Today, when most images of reality are created by machines for machines, and humanity tries to understand the future of artificial intelligence and its significance for the transformation of human subjectivity, the title of Alexey Korsi's exhibition seems obvious and predictable. But it, like the first fleeting glance at the exhibition, contains a trick that is the main subject of the project's research. The machine that the artist speaks of is not a sum of the details he presents or other machines and algorithms created by humans, not a tool that allowed for the creation of a perfect gradient of the sky, but our brain, whose operations are limited by the experience and knowledge of the surrounding world that this experience programs.
Korsi is a philosopher of contemporary art, a philosopher dealing with fundamental categories of human existence and aesthetics: will, the sublime, mechanisms of symbolization, the real and the abstract. This reflects a rare consistency and persistence of the artist today, who thinks of his practice as a single large project, aiming to embody defining phenomena in form, despite their simultaneous inexhaustibility and apparent obviousness. The main lyrical hero of the artist (though we never see him in the works themselves) is a person bewildered by the complexity of the world's structure, which only grows with our increasing knowledge of it. The central task of Korsi's practice is to pose questions, not to create material objects.
The ideal, seemingly entirely man-made details of an unrecognizable mechanism on the wall are not a hint at technical progress or collapse, but, almost literally (due to the chrome surface) — a mirror of our cognitive abilities, revealing the "conveyor-like" nature of our perception. Through gloss, symmetry, and deliberately displayed functionality (the details have no "artistic" fittings or other extraneous elements not related to functional application), Korsi deceives the viewer's consciousness, transforming pure abstraction into an element of some mechanism, and their totality into a sort of "skeleton" of an unknown machine.
The "Arches" series works with the same mechanism of our consciousness but produces not a whole through parts, but rather allows the viewer to "produce" space by dividing infinity, as it is through delimitation that we build our coordinate system. Korsi places arches along the viewer's path to another part of the exhibition but does not set precise behavioral rules, leaving them to the viewer's discretion.
The silkscreens from the "Machine of Order" series also work with the "humanization" of space, reconciling it with our cognitive abilities and habits. The works, created at the limit of media capabilities, resemble the cyanometer created by Horace Benedict de Saussure in the late 18th century, which allowed the determination of fifty-three shades of the sky by comparing the sky before the experimenter's eyes with a sample table. By creating abstract works, Korsi is actually constructing a statement about the "human" — the possibilities and limitations of our thinking, the main author of our picture of the surrounding world, where something always remains beyond the visible.
Curator: Anna ZhurbĐ°
