Artist Nasedkin revived “Venetian stanzas” using woodcuts

Brodsky from boxwood

Vladimir Nasedkin celebrated his 69th birthday by opening the Venetian Stanzas exhibition. The artist presented a book in an atmosphere of library calm and silence, where each image does not even illustrate, but visualizes the poems of Joseph Brodsky, written in Venice, and dedicated to the city-museum on the water. The artist carefully and painstakingly carved each form for his woodcuts on boxwood. How Nasedkin saw “a cloud crumpled overnight” and “a weightless mass of azure squared”, “MK” examined through a magnifying glass.

Under the white arches of the ancient walls of the 17th century building, the “Venetian stanzas” are read especially meditatively. The audience finds itself as if in a museum-library. Before us are showcases, where under glass there are 16 spreads with poems by Joseph Brodsky and their visualizations created by artist Vladimir Nasedkin. On the right side of each sheet are the lines themselves, printed on a special handmade paper, and on the left side there are mysterious patterns resembling fingerprints. You look closely, and in this dance of lines, Venice is reflected in fragments.

It seems that here a lone seagull flies over the lagoon, and here a labyrinth of old streets grows near the shore. You look closely (there is a special illuminated magnifying glass for this) – and the houses turn into fish or gondolas. It seems that small pictures (about 5 by 5 cm) have cinematic magic and change before our eyes. Another oddity of them is that despite the micro size, it seems that we are looking at the macro world – the whole universe called Venice – from top to bottom. In the “library” you can see the engraver’s workplace – boxwood molds, tools, photographs, a large magnifying glass next to the works of the poet, whose lines inspired this painstaking work.

“These are fragments of reality – the sea, the lagoon, the streets,” says the artist. – In my opinion, poetry is the art of ugly perception, that is, a visual image may not arise at all. Poetry as fine art: much can be said through pauses, aesthetic allusion, understatement. They can be enclosed in an empty space where suddenly there is a splash of fish or a fragment of a gondola’s hanging. If you look carefully, you can see more.

That is how – through pauses and allusions – a lot is said in Brodsky’s poetry. “At night we talk to our own echo; it has a marble warmth, a booming, empty aquarium with misted glass … “The creaking vultures of the gondolas sway, uttering silence at random” … “A cloud crumpled during the night straightens the mealy sail …”. For the poet Brodsky, Venice was an “earthly paradise.” There, in the cemetery of San Michele in 1996, he found his last refuge.

What is Venice for you? – I’m interested in Vladimir Nasedkin.

– A place of joy where I have visited and exhibited many times. This project was first presented just in Venice – in the library of the Ca Foscari University. Then it was shown in Rome, and recently in Vladikavkaz. Now in Moscow, but this is not a repetition of those exhibitions, each time it is read in its own way.

– Do you miss the city on the water?

– Nothing, let’s go again. The life of an artist is an endless cosmos. You never know where you will be today and who you will be tomorrow. And you don’t even have to think about it. We must do our job.

Nasedkin’s friend, the artist Alexander Ponomarev, was the curator of that Venetian exhibition at the Ca Foscari library. It was he who pushed Vladimir to the idea of ​​creating an artist’s book, where each copy is unique, 50 of them were made in total. The author does not have any left in his personal collection.

“Woodcutting today is an unfashionable, almost lost art,” says Ponomarev. “Very few artists have succeeded in this technique. Of these, few are in contact with contemporary art. This is a complex refined technique, and Volodya works amazingly in it. I got the idea to make it in the library, where before there were no exhibitions, and now they are there regularly. I remember how Count Girolamo Marcello, a Venetian aristocrat, a descendant of the Doge, came to the opening in 2011. Brodsky dedicated his last poem to him. And it was he who obtained permission to bury the poet in the cemetery of San Miquel. He said that he even saw the cat that Brodsky turned into after his death. The count died two years ago. He also appreciated the fine work of Volodya.