Alexander Konstantinov’s exhibition opened at the New Tretyakov Gallery

Linear poetics of the wandering forest

In 1992, he became one of the first contemporary artists whose exhibition opened at the New Tretyakov Gallery. This was the event from which the history of the museum began, which shows not only the classics and avant-garde of the early twentieth century, but also current authors. And in 2006, he transformed the entrance to the gallery on Krymsky Val, leaning lattice “engraving” installations in the style of Viktor Vasnetsov against the façade. Alexander Konstantinov was a borderline master, whose art combined minimalism and scale, poetry and mathematical precision, subtle graphics and architectural monumentality. This is easy to feel at the exhibition “From Line to Architecture” in the West Wing of the New Tretyakov Gallery.

By education, Alexander Konstantinov was a mathematician. In my youth, I thought about going into architecture, but chose the exact sciences: theoretical research allowed me not to run headlong to work every day. Konstantinov did not like fuss and was a pedant in life and work. He is a fundamentalist researcher in both mathematics and the arts, which he has been interested in since childhood and turned to professionally in the 1980s. At first, in parallel with his work at the Department of Applied Mathematics of the Moscow University of Electronics and Mathematics, he visited various art studios. And in 1987 he joined the Hermitage association, which included Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Igor Shelkovsky, Ernst Neizvestny and Oscar Rabin. Later, the State Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) grew out of the Hermitage, which for a long time became a trendsetter in Russian contemporary art. During this turbulent time of perestroika, Konstantinov found his own style, which is described as “the poetry of error.” He used graph paper and stationery forms, emphasizing errors, stains, and random fingerprints, from which he composed his visual “poems.” Over the years, fine graphics scaled up to architecture and giant installations with which he covered facades and built museum spaces out of them. But any totality always began with a line for him. His exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, which was carefully and carefully prepared by his widow Natalya and his architect friends Evgeny Ass and Yuri Avvakumov, is also filled with them.

The exhibition begins with a frame. Entering the basement space of the West Wing of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the gaze slides through a gray void surrounded by a red square with white inserts. This epigraph reminds us: Alexander Konstantinov is a successor to the traditions of the Russian avant-garde. In 1994, his exhibition “Forward and backward perspective of Russian minimalism” took place in Austria. 1924 Lyubov Popova – 1994 Alexander Konstantinov.” The project was based on a comparison of the Amazonian ornaments of the Russian avant-garde and the “ruled lines” of the artist-mathematician. The author of the introductory catalog article, art critic Dmitry Sarabyanov, then wrote that the artist “is searching for new interpretations of space, plane, texture” and “combines the visual and the tactile.” This tactile texture is easy to feel at the current exhibition.

In the center of the exhibition are wooden installation blocks with soft metal inclusions, which either flow crosswise or, like pebbles on a stormy river, protrude on the sides, forming various ornaments. There are boards polished to the state of a soft sponge, others cut into logical lines, others wrapped in strips of tin. All around are works on paper, marked with linear geometry. And in each, if you look closely, there is a deviation from the general system – that same “poetry of error.”

One of the largest works is called “Ruler”. This is a long strip with a white scale drawn on black graph paper, which, like a heartbeat line, jumps upward from time to time and then returns to normal. Various linear structures are formed on the walls into large-scale installations; they are illuminated from the inside, thanks to which they turn into a pure idea. There are works folded from transparent sheets and again with lines, but they are not flat, but three-dimensional. Here an architectural form grows from simple geometry on a sheet of paper.

There is an installation about two meters high in the form of a “hatched” tree. Konstantinov drew such trees, reminiscent of cloud delusions, at the dawn of the 1980s. Early embroidered landscapes can be found on one of the walls. Later, in the 2010s, they grew into large-scale installations, one of which was installed in Malevich Park last year. And a few years earlier, in 2006, Konstantinov “grew” a whole forest of blue graphic trees in Luxembourg. The author called him “wandering.” He managed to implement many large-scale architectural projects in the last 15 years of his life – in France, Austria, Switzerland, the USA, and Japan. Konstantinov said: “Architecture is a field for which formal logic, clarity of construction, development of rhythms, as in music, are generic characteristics.” This mathematical clarity and musical rhythm are characteristic of the master’s author’s style, but his main charm lies precisely in the errors, in the deviations from the system, in the wandering semiotics. Nonlinear randomness (to which, by the way, his scientific work as a mathematician was devoted) also has its own system, but even more in them is human non-systematicity.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29211 dated February 7, 2024

Newspaper headline:
Linear poetics of the wandering forest