In the Delirium project, Anton Kushaev addresses the canonical motif of the still life with a flower, capturing its decay in a hallucinatory, dream-like scenography that integrates a network of allusions to post-war modernism, neo-Gothic aesthetics, and the principles of the cryotic theater, which aimed to bring experiences of border states to the forefront. The exhibition features new works by the artist – canvases and graphics. The association of the flower with early trauma – a trace left by the experience of the First World War – is a common theme in surrealist art. The nuanced symbolism that allows trauma to take visual form is also present in Kushaev's work. Delirium, a disorder of consciousness causing distortions in reality perception, affective disturbances, and obsessive states, is always triggered by a rupture in the fabric of rational events. The habits of everyday life, with its magical repetition of rituals, are interrupted by a glitch, mistake, or breakdown, initiating a new order driven by its own logic. The process of creating such parallel alternative monotony – a scenario of disrupting familiar spatial coordinates – is depicted in Kushaev's paintings and graphics, breaking it down into four phases: collision, numbness, destruction, transformation.
The thread of this black-and-white narrative revolves around the image of revealed knowledge changing the nature of things. It brings us back to the circle of canonical questions about the boundaries of the visible and the ethics of vision, the risk of sight, and the experience of a wandering gaze. Kushayev captures the trajectories of life that imply revelation and transformation in the dry terms of religious art, methodically constructing his narrative as is customary in the iconographic tradition. Equally significant is the subtextual dialogue with the classics of Soviet unofficial art, where the sculptural expressiveness of Ernst Neizvestny coexists with the deconstruction of the visible world by Mikhail Schwartzman – the aggressive materiality of the sensual and the sacred fragility of the sublime. The examination, verification of the material world, and its diagnosis are the initial inputs for discovering the formula of healing.
Curator: Maria Doronina
