Alexandra Paperno

POPULAR ASTRONOMY

The title of the exhibition is taken from a well-known, once popular but now absolutely antiquarian French book* that is filled with tables, pictures, engravings, technical drawings and all possible theories and stories about the night sky. The idea that a lofty and complex science about the stars can have a popular format without losing its quality is fundamental here. It meets another, American idea of popularity as general accessibility (we certainly mean Pop Art which, in its own time, remained being an art for the elites). Today, on crossroads of popular science and contemporary art, the project of Alexandra Paperno defines popular (populus, social) as a place of finding of new meanings.
Elizaveta Plavinskaya.

*Book by a French astronomer Camille Flammarion Astronomie Populaire (Popular Astronomy), published in 1879.

STAR MAPS

Paperno’s paintings are set on the borderline between abstraction and figurativeness, between the image of an object and the interpretation of its attributes. It becomes evident at once, from the series’ title: precise and quiet. It doesn’t point at the starry arch, but merely at its maps. However, it is not always exactly the maps. Sometimes it is a globe, sometimes just a single star. The star, however, may as well turn out to be the Grey sun. Not a point, but a tondo (a professional term), a circle, expressively painted over with the most low-key, the most complicated colour. It so happens that the sun is not exactly the sun, and the stars are more like points, celestial nebula – coloristic surfaces, but altogether – it represents sheer painting. Nevertheless, it is not “merely painting”, not a superficial formalism, but a huge mass of deeply emotional substance. It is the very thing, which the night sky represents for each of us: dreamlike, mysterious and inaccessibly sublime. And the best art for it is nothing else but a map.
Vladimir Levashov

BIRDING

Images of birds, stealing and reappearing in the layers of painterly space, with their contour-like laconic shapes, remind of V-marks left by someone on the margins of a school notebook — seemingly fitting into a certain semiotic system.

Space revealed in the living pulse of avian flight is an aesthetization of the process of search, an image of civilization in transition. The surface of the painting is multilayered, paint alternates with thin rice paper, mounted so as to appear translucent. Paper works as a glaze, multiple thin layers create depth, and the subtle tones seep through each other, contributing to the overall shimmering effect, which creates an illusion of beating wings.

ON SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS IN THE SIXTH FIVE–YEAR PLAN

The series consists of paintings of various sizes depicting plans of apartments in social housing projects, walls, and a World Map.

In 1955, the Communist Party adopted the resolution “On the Elimination of Excess in Design and Construction”. The task set for architects was development of standardized projects and standardized designs, dramatically reducing the cost of housing and making it accessible to the working class. The goal of the project was that in 1980 every Soviet family would greet Communism in a separate apartment. Thus started the Sixth Five-Year Plan (1956-1960), marking the beginning of mass construction of block khrushchevka houses. The map of the world soars up under the unforgiving ratio of living conditions that have been planned down to the centimeter. If the sleeping arrangement has been devised correctly, the Soviet schoolchild, upon falling asleep in any of the ten time zones of the wide country, sees this map on the wall before him. It hangs in the bedroom as a reminder of the great conquests of the motherland and of victories yet to come on Earth and in space. Sleep and the painting gradually blur the registers of time and space.

COLOURIZATION / 2015

Eleven red flags are installed in flag brackets located around the entire perimeter of the facade of the Circular Kinopanorama. A red flag appears on the mast of the battleship at the end of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. To make the flag appear red in the black-and- white silent film, the retouchers had to colourize many film frames. The red flags on the facade of the Circular Kinopanorama have also been hand-coloured in an expressive manner. Eleven repetitions of the flag colourization create a sensation of moving lm frames. They lend the old cinema building a similarity to the celebrated battleship in the film, no longer sailing through the lines of enemy ships as in Eisenstein’s film, but instead through time.

CINEMA OF REPEAT FILM

“God is the ‘infinitely distant man.” — Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

Alexandra sees interiors as deserted as the ones captured by the camera of Alfred Hitchock, freezing time in endless and anxious expectation – suspense. When portraying the interiors presented in her three-picture frame series, Alexandra shifts the perspective, creating the effect of vertigo. In the films of the mid-1950s, Hitchcock diverged from Hollywood’s gold standard, which prescribed combining the perspective of the camera with that of the director and viewer, and instead transmitted to the camera the perspective of the actor who is feeling dizzy. Paperno presents us with such a perspective for examination, which changes our gravitational settings: she does not represent, but instead places us inside these almost flat images.

SELF-LOVE AMONG THE RUINS / 2018

“Ruins lie” Ivan Chechot

Ruin—as a space served as the point of departure for Alexandra Paperno when she prepared this project and is the central idea underpinning the exhibition as a whole. A ruin not only represents a place that is disappearing or has disappeared, but also constitutes a key image for culture in the modern period. It has become a symbol of our clustered past, a melancholy and yearning for the “golden age”, have articulated and cultivated the aesthetics of gradual decline, and virtually become the main background for European painters from the 17th to 19th centuries. By the 20th century the charm of a ruin and ruins as an idea have not gone anywhere. However, the actual concept of a ruin and the specific “ruined” state applied not so much to architecture as to major ideological and political projects and more broadly to culture, which has fallen apart on numerous occasions, only to be reassembled anew. And Paperno is working in particular with this cultural context, namely situations where culture and civilization have suddenly been transformed into an arbitrary set of strange rules and codes, whose meaning was lost a long time ago. She seeks such moments of rupture in relations and presents them with her own inimitable tenderness and irony, drawing on various artistic media.
The name of the exhibition borrowed from Bruce Chatwin is the working title of one of his essays, which plays on the widespread cliche of Victorian culture (Robert Browning’s poem Love Among the Ruins, the picture of the same name by Sir Edward Colely Buren-Jones). Self-love has been virtually the underlying framework of artistic activity adopted in the modern era. Self-love is transformed repeatedly and consequently the need for self-expression, driven by the narcissistic desire to be seen and evaluated, has been the driving force of the artistic process for centuries. Self-Love Among the Ruins represents such self-expression squared, improvisation on the topic of the main motifs, genesis and driver of painting in classical understanding of the word and is also an attempt at an ironic review of the self-determination of the artist working to some extent as the nanos gigantum humeris insidentes (dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants).