Screens: Yuri Alexandrov

22 January - 19 February 2011

A picture can't be a window to reality or to other worlds, not to the artist's emotional experience, nor to some concealed meaning. It doesn't hide something in its depth, in an illusory third dimension. On the contrary it hides and seals, becoming a shutter on an opened window, becoming a screen. Perhaps the screen just protects us from ourselves or from something on the other side. And instead of the desired depth we see just the surface's folds, which don’t disappear when the screen is smoothed.

Yuri Alexandrov

 

Courbet and Poussin, Kharms and Oleynikov, the Soviet children's book and pop art are all mixed up, but easy to read: as if we very quickly thumbed through a book, and the images of the pictures blend in our mind and shift from page to page. The layering of a series of visual and narrative meanings is not so much technical and confusing as picturesque. In this respect, it is very St. Petersburg art, here there is no love for the word in its pure conceptual form, but it is brilliantly manipulated, creating a picturesque frame or a screen.

Kira Dolina, "Kommersant", 25 January 2011