Remains consists of some works and ideas from the performance ‘Everything lies ahead!’ (15th March 2011), when Andrey Kuzkin sealed all his works, personal things and the contents of his studio in steel boxes. Over the years Kuzkin's romantic nihilism has been moving closer and closer to that moment — any idea at once became a history, solidifying like the concrete, which Andrey walked around for hours stirring during the penetrative performance 'In a Circle'.
Kuzkin's method is based on the auto-therapeutic style of art. Its essence is brevity, its practice is сlearing away useless meanings and obsolete ideas. This morbidly emotional art springs from the inner need of body and soul for the purification of art and life. Kuzkin morbidly reacts to the world. He whitens glossy magazines, attacking the notion of glamour. He distorts common perception, taking just what he wants into his crystallized world, where all extraneous aspects disappear revealing a central meaning. In this world the artist speaks only when he has something to say, when something happens inside that demands to be expressed. And this expression is deeply sensual, for only spontaneous emotion has authenticity.
Material art has to address lived life, which has passed and cannot be returned. By sealing his life into zinc coffins of time, Kuzkin separates the rest of himself from the past, trying to leave it behind. The recent past is always blurred, because it is hard to define it now in historical terms. But Kuzkin's emotionality guarantees that the artist has played all his cards leaving no chance to come back.
Remains are always tragic — from this perspective any banality will be exposed. Struggling against the triteness of life, Kuzkin tries to render historical remains, preciselyas history, demonstrating the final end of life without any perspective for a future. Everything has already taken place, what occurs from this point on is new life.r Kuzkin, died. Kuzkin junior reviews his arsenal again, throw off useless, breaking unreal, counting the rest and leave it. Inevitability predominates over creation making it self-critical. Again and again refusing something, which descreditet itself, he belives in need to leav any convencionality. Because just purification allows to go further to real meaning.
