Alexander Konstantinov: a large retrospective of the quiet artist
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A retrospective of Alexander Konstantinov (1953–2019) is being held in Moscow in two parts: graphics and objects are exhibited in the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, replicas of architecture and sculpture for public spaces are in GES-2. Such mathematically verified, pure art for art’s sake is today’s ideal, but achieving the ideal in today’s conditions and by order is not possible.
The international career of Alexander Konstantinov, and he worked a lot abroad – in Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, France, Norway, the USA, Japan – began in the 2000s. And this was the new Konstantinov, no longer a chamber artist, but entering a large space, the comprehension of which he was engaged in as an artist and as a mathematician, no longer a draftsman and engraver, but a designer of landscapes and architecture, a master of transferring cross or longitudinal shading taken from his own graphic series, on huge planes of facades or on hills and lawns of parks. At first, he “drew” with tape on film, wrapping it around buildings and landscapes, like Christo and Jeanne-Claude—Muscovites may remember such “tape” architectural installations made for the National Center for Contemporary Art on Zoological Street or for the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (“White Quarter”) . Later he began to work with wooden slats, aluminum lamellas, steel profiles – the airy shells that melt in the fog are made of aluminum for bus stops in Suzu in the north of the Noto Peninsula, the latest, Japanese, project of Konstantinov, an allusion to Hiroshige’s “53 Tokaido Station”. An exhibition at GES-2 is dedicated to the architectural and design aspect of his work, where replicas of the red “House under the Linden Tree,” the entrance pavilion for the Otten Kunstraum in Hohenems in western Austria, and the “Blue Trees,” intended for an estate in New York state, were made. Both the transparent grid of the “Trees” and the light oblique shading of the “House” fit perfectly into the space of the central nave of the power plant, reconstructed by Renzo Piano—the architectural ideas and park objects of Konstantinov really suit such a Western, aesthetically sterile environment, not charged with social contradictions. A small retrospective has been opened at the Tretyakov Gallery, prepared by curator Irina Gorlova and architect Evgeny Ass together with the family of the late artist: here it is clear that the minimalist gloss of later works in public spaces is already in Konstantinov’s early graphics.
Alexander Konstantinov was a completely lonely artist. Although in 1987 he joined the perestroika Hermitage association, created on the initiative of art critic Leonid Bazhanov, he made like-minded friends who defended the institutional rights of contemporary art in the late Soviet cultural system, he began to be exhibited – in 1992, Konstantinov’s personal exhibition was held in Tretyakov, and he turned out to be one of the first people from the underground whose works were shown within the sacred walls, but aesthetically he was absolutely alone. A mathematician, Doctor of Mathematical Sciences, professor at the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics, author of many scientific works, Konstantinov drew from childhood, studied privately in various Moscow studios, worked “at the desk”, and decided to break with mathematics only in the 2000s, when foreign residencies and orders became impossible to combine with teaching. However, there is no trace of any Soviet pathos of “lyrical physicists”, or anything Soviet or anti-Soviet, gleaned from the underground, in his art. It is completely devoid of internal social tension, the stamp of the conflict between officialdom and non-conformism, the painful search for its place in the “self- and tamizdat” artistic environment – he was lucky enough to come to the world of free, uncensored art of the late 1980s and 1990s as an established, mature artist, who did not have to fight for the right to breathe the way he breathes.
Judging by the graphics of the 1980s, “landscapes”, “trees” and “trunks”, striving for extreme abstraction from nature or, more precisely, to the search for its primary forms, it is noticeable that his artistic reference in those years was Giorgio Morandi, not still life-bottle , but landscape, measuring space using two basic modules – a tree and a house (it was not for nothing that “Blue Trees” and “House under the Linden Tree” were chosen for reconstruction at GES-2). It is also noticeable how passionate he is about the engravings of the old masters, artistic and technical – such as geographical maps and architectural drawings: his finest, neat shading with pen and ink on paper can easily be mistaken for a burin or etching. Then other reference points will appear – Piet Mondrian, Sol Le Witt, Constantin Brancusi – the echo of the European avant-garde can be heard in the drawings and objects of the 1990s. They tried to declare him the heir of the Russian avant-garde artists, and he did not particularly resist, talking about the immanent minimalism of the avant-garde, but if you look for visual analogies, they are not at all in geometric, but in organic abstraction – in the color tables of Mikhail Matyushin. They tried to connect him with the tradition of the absurd, to present him as a sort of Kafka illustrator, apparently believing that anyone who takes up a government form is following in the footsteps of Ilya Kabakov, who depicted the confrontation between a small man and a large bureaucratic machine.
Indeed, in the 1990s, Konstantinov moved away from albeit very conventional figurativeness: his source of inspiration was various technical papers, forms and forms, “smart faces” of oscilloscopes and calculators – in a word, that “found geometry” that organizes the world described with the help of coordinate systems and statistical tables. A series of “Graph Papers”, “Forms”, “Radars”, “Targets”, “Rulers”, “Scales” arose – he was interested in failures in grids and rulers, he multiplied accidents and errors with the help of stains of milk, blood or mold, decorating and already exquisite sheets, he hung these sheets, gathering into iconostases, at different angles, so that it seemed as if the wind had burst into the exhibition hall and brought its windy order here. Critics often called these graphic series abstract, which greatly upset the artist: he himself considered his art rather pictorial, asking the question of how to depict the work of the intellect, consciousness mastering space, and the space of consciousness. In the late 1980s, he began making sculpture objects from metal and wood: creating flat reliefs from copper or aluminum dies, inlaid wooden volumes of roughly hewn, angular or perfectly polished, streamlined shapes with metal wire, staples and nails. There was beauty in the way the copper nails entered the wooden body – both the design beauty of the thing and the philosophical beauty of thinking about sets and accidents. It seems that the topic of his Ph.D. thesis, “Description of nonlinear random processes,” was developed in artistic form.
A retrospective of Alexander Konstantinov, a little late for his 70th birthday, could not have come at a more opportune time today, when modern art is expected to be something that for the most part it is not. That is, pure art for art’s sake, soaring above the prose of socio-political life in the empyrean of abstract form or scientific and philosophical matters – it is not for nothing that there are so many abstraction exhibitions on the posters of the main capital museums. It would seem that times of unprecedented creative freedom are coming – after all, social responsibility and political consciousness have always been demanded from the domestic artist at all levels, from the progressive public to the powers that be, which, however, was often understood by the public and the authorities in different ways. But pure art for art’s sake is pure, so as not to get dirty with the order – it seems that Konstantinov’s phenomenon was possible only in that amazingly free time, the uniqueness of which is felt especially acutely today.
“Alexander Konstantinov. From line to architecture”. Tretyakov Gallery, Krymsky Val, until May 26
“Alexander Konstantinov. House of air and lines”. GES-2, until May 26
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