At the posthumous exhibition of artist Andrei Filippov, his creative flight was analyzed

Philosophy of celestial geography

“We are all engaged in reconstructing the future through the past,” said artist Andrei Filippov. A master of subtle and witty visual-linguistic play, one of the brightest representatives of Moscow conceptualism began his creative career at the dawn of Perestroika, and ended in a new era of change. A year ago, the 63-year-old artist died suddenly due to “heart problems,” as reported by relatives. Now the first large posthumous exhibition entitled “Celestial Geography, or Debriefing” has opened at the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, which shows both the early works of Andrei Filippov and the latest. This is not yet a retrospective, but already a comprehensive look at the artist’s work, which now reads almost like a prophecy.

Andrei Filippov’s exhibition, curated by Elena Kuprina-Lyakhovich, who worked with the artist for 27 years, begins with a section called “Test of the Pen.” Here are collected works created in the 1980s, immediately after graduating from the Moscow Art Theater School. Already here his author’s visual language appears, which in the future turned into a creative strategy and philosophy. Ironic intonation, eclecticism, appeal to recognizable images and artistic traditions. Here are Vasnetsov’s heroes with the faces of Engels, Marx and Engels. Here is a policeman, who has rolled up his trouser legs, tiredly, but, it seems, dreamily looking at the sea. Here is a portrait of a friend, artist Konstantin Zvezdochetov, painted in the style of cubism – a hero in the image of a general with a double-headed eagle in his hands. Already here one can read the artist’s original method, which mixes the history of the world, different artistic styles, and genome symbols into a complex cocktail, turning each work into a philosophical statement on the verge of a foul.

Later, the double-headed eagle – a symbol of greatness and power, which migrated to Russian heraldry from Byzantine – will become an integral part of the Philippian language. He will write phrases in Russian and Latin and various symbols on his paintings using very small two-headed “birds” (eagles). They can be found in the next chapter of the exhibition – “The Hour Between the Wolf and the Dog.” From dawn (the first stage of the creative journey) we find ourselves in the twilight zone.

The viewer is presented with a series of paintings painted in “Gentian blue” already at the end of the 2010s. Dilapidated ancient columns, skulls and desert landscapes float out of the thickening darkness, above which phrases from the Eagles float: “It’s a small world”, “Guardians”, “Silent night”, “Hollow as a falcon”. These multi-layered metaphors are about the problem of choice between West and East, which for centuries has faced the inhabitants of a country that occupies a large area of ​​Asia and Europe. The coat of arms also looks in two directions, prompting the viewer to think about the nature of this “cocktail” of national consciousness.

Following the twilight, dawn again, which leads to a white winter landscape in the spirit of Levitan, where the “eagles” write out a quote from Salinger: “The Catcher in the Rye.” A wooden bridge leads to the painting, the kind that is sometimes placed over a puddle on a rutted road so as not to drown in the mud. The reference to the famous novel sets the vector of Filippov’s philosophy: one cannot refuse life experience, just as one cannot return to childhood again. The white chapter is called “Between Magnetic and True Nord.” “What is usually considered a revelation is simply, as in maritime navigation, the declination of the compass needle, that is, the angular difference between magnetic and true north. In this gap, in fact, real art exists.”

It is in this gap that the artist seeks the truth. On the next floor you can find a series of “Allegorical Abstractions”, where the viewer is given the opportunity to look through such a gap for himself. On the one hand, we see figurative paintings with clear subjects – each containing a reference to the style that became the harbinger of abstract and conceptual art: a peach on a table (Matisse), water lilies (Monet), a cubist crab (Picasso). In front of the viewer is a magical kaleidoscope tube that turns paintings into symmetrical abstract patterns. Opposite them are canvases depicting the same patterns, symbolizing the allegorical nature of art and reminiscent of the ancient laws of symmetry in art. Each of the paintings has a built-in peephole, like a door, where the text is found: “Self-portrait of Pygmalion”, “Cubism paying tribute to impressionism”, “Arte Povera super neogeo dolens”.

Each subsequent chapter is built on such a philosophical and playful combination of different cultures and traditions, where the details contain references to the past and at the same time a forecast for the future. Roman-Byzantine symbolism with the “imperial genome” is combined with Russian breadth and melancholy. From this complex penetration into eras, which in one form or another have been absorbed into the national subconscious, emerges a reconstruction of the future, which we are doomed to build from the embedded genome. The final point of the exhibition was a self-portrait of the artist, where he sleeps against the backdrop of a serene sea, from which an eagle’s wing rises. It seems that at this moment Andrei Filippov himself gains wings, and he dreams of a great past and a vague future. It seems that the catchphrase of the ancients is hovering invisibly in the sky above him: “Memento mori.”