Andrei Chezhin – NY Arts

There are two themes that thread their way throughout Chezin’s works: that of man and his original uneven attitude towards himself and the world; and that of the memory space in which strange metamorphoses and surrealistic shifts in time happen. Chezhin has wrought a paradoxical juxtaposition of naturally different time-and-space rhythms by working with great ingenuity on old nameless prints, on excerpts from classical modernist works.

Andrei Chezhin

NY Arts

There are two themes that thread their way throughout Chezin’s works: that of man and his original uneven attitude towards himself and the world; and that of the memory space in which strange metamorphoses and surrealistic shifts in time happen. Chezhin has wrought a paradoxical juxtaposition of naturally different time-and-space rhythms by working with great ingenuity on old nameless prints, on excerpts from classical modernist works. He prefers black-and-white photography, exploiting all the possibilities of the original print, which, in effect, is turned to a refined graphic plate. Having spent many long days in a regular portrait photographer’s studio, Chezhin, came to realize the worth and significance of a simple, dispassionate studio photograph, and he elaborated upon this theme in a series of grotesque and absurd images devoted to the theme of Harms, The Harmsiade; he further developed it through the prism of "The Red Square" of Malevich. In another series, human faces are replaced with drawing-pins, frightening as they are by their uniformity, which, paradoxically, reminds one of the definition given by R. Bart, according to which a photograph is a wound, a cut.

NY ARTS: Your pinch project seemingly integrates a history unleashed by Malevich, and taken through El Lissitzky and Rochenko.

Chezhin: The project is called The Drawing-pin and Modernism. The Soviet drawing-pin is the image which I have obtained and exploited in this series. The point of the project is to fathom the way modernist-artists would be using the Soviet drawing-pin in their works. In fact, in this series I address a much wider range of artists than a mere Malevich-Lissitzky set; I aim at the Picasso-Kunz array. All the works of this series are reproductions of works that do not really exist. The project goes on. The photographs are made without the help of the computer, that is, each is just the work done on exposition, toning, and printing. The series refers to works of many American cult artists: Warhol, Rauschenburg, Pollack, Oldenburg and others.

Courtesy of www.russkialbum.ru