“If this is the case – that the world-in-itself paradoxically presents itself to us – then what is it exactly that is presented, what is revealed? Quite simply, what is revealed is the “hiddenness” of the world... This hiddenness is also, in a way, hideous”
Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet
The practice of Vladimir Chernyshev (b. 1992, Nizhny Novgorod) is indissolubly linked to the place where he was born and started his artistic career. Located in 400 km east of Moscow, the city of Nizhny Novgorod stands at the confluence of two great rivers (the Volga and the Oka) and is remarkable for its beautiful but decaying wooden architecture, street art scene and bewitching natural landscapes. Far from the rigidity and authority of the capital, Chernyshev's projects evoke an obscure, distant, ambivalent world. They encompass a diverse range of techniques, from studio practice and mixed media installations to land art and photo documentation. Chernyshev addresses the dichotomy between the world-in-itself and the human, exploring the role of non-human agents –Time, Nature, chemical changes and biological cycles – in the process of co-creation.
An emphasis on decay or/and endless metamorphosis could be seen as an inverted reflection on the very act of creation. Chernyshev’s choice of materials (wood, tar, metal, pine rosin, soot, wax, etc.) is geared to the revelation of this tragedy of subtle but inevitable erasure. Wood, for example, “the most natural of materials, consciously or unconsciously, is rendering itself back to its original chaos”, in the artist‘s own words.
Suburban Practices (photo documentation, slide projection in the small room), a project that began in 2013 and is still ongoing, exemplifies Chernyshev’s approach. The works were created in a landscape of partly abandoned, semi-delmolished, out-of-town allotments not far from Nizhny Novgorod. Chernyshev’s paintings and installations work with pre-existing structures that had a practical purpose (low barns, tool sheds, summerhouses, makeshift dwellings with one window and one door), or create independent land-art structures. These structures all share a common attribute – they were created as temporary.
Chernyshev’s artworks, scattered around the allotments, replicate the cycles of nature, slowly dissolving into their natural surroundings, swallowed up by the verdancy of overgrown kitchen gardens and the surrounding forest, gradually returning to the raw materiality of Nature. The photo documentation reflects the processual nature of Suburban Practices. The artist’s method here is not centred on a final result, but on a process of constant change.
The graphic series (Untitled, 6 paper works on 300 g/m² paper. Soot, wax, 104x 147 cm each. 2022-2024; Untitled, paperwork on 290 g/m cotton paper. Soot, wax, 148x148, 2024), which Chernyshev has been working on for the last two years, explores the importance of fragments for referencing another, hidden history – a landscape that is difficult to read. The main motif of this series is fragments of river landscapes engulfed by fire. A lack of borders and absence of narrative implies a universal context that is hinted at in the traces of rainbow and rain, butterfly and flames, reflections in water and lightning. The whole graphic effect is literally a trace – the image is made by scraping a metal rod across carbon paper. Repeated erasing and layering, sometimes using hundreds of sheets, create the contours of landscapes made of multiple images that wander from work to work. The technical method is indirect – the image is effectively a by-product, a shadow of the material and a shadow of meaning. The pigment of the paper is a mixture of carbon and wax, and carbon is both a product of decomposition (a result of combustion) and a material of creation. This ambiguity of both material and technique is fundamental to Chernyshev’s artistic method.
In his book Anywhere or Not At All, which addresses the connection between Romanticism and contemporary art, Peter Osborne discusses the notion of the fragment. “Something – anything – becomes a possible object of philosophical interpretation – that is, a possible object of experience of truth, in so far as it is grasped as a fragment: namely, a finite form that carries a reference to the infinite, negatively, through the combination of the partiality of its content and the completeness or self-sufficiency of its form. From this point of view, the work of art carries a metaphysical meaning in so far as it is a fragment”. Fragmentation is a key part of Chernyshev’s practice. The viewer is positioned in front of these obscure landscapes, which might appear to them like a half-forgotten dream, an extension of themselves, a buried meaning, or a half-remembered experience associated with insight or intuition.
Mural. Chernyshev has a reputation for intuitive and subtle graphic technique. The practice of drawing (elaborating errors, overlaying) is central to his work, whether on the walls of abandoned buildings or on random scraps of paper, often assembled into series. The mural in the present exhibition will have to disappear after the exhibition, evoking the ruination of the artwork which has been reflected in one way or another in most of Chernyshev’s projects.
As the artist himself says: “The image of the ruin illustrates one of the most emblematic shifts in the perception of time – from the concept of a linear flow of time to the concept of temporal relations or, in other words, temporal knots in which the past, the present of that past and the future of the present coexist. The focus of such practices is precisely temporality, or the conditions of existence of works in different time periods. The object of art is not so much the result as the process and condition of the work, which can include various mutations that go as far as the destruction of the work.”
Rooted Rainbow III and Rooted Rainbow IV (wood, gouache, pastel, acrylic, tar, mixed technique, 93x76 cm, 2024). The Rooted Rainbows are the most recent works by the artist, created in 2024 and continuing a series of images of impossible or rare natural phenomena, which have been a constant thread in the artist’s work since 2018.
As in his graphic productions, Chernyshev generates the image through multi-exposure and layering – rough sketches, cuts, drops encrusted with tar and pastel multilayering. The wood surface allows the artist to work "inwards" and to become “corporeal”. Several multicultural codes, each referring to a blurred, sometimes barely legible element of the artist's personal language are combined: arches, stars, rainbows, shadows, flows or currents. They are arbitrary forms in which the signified is separated from the signifier; the drawing follows its own bizarre logic, breaking away from the original concrete meaning and bringing us to more universal definitions. Each element of the drawing becomes a fragment that extends beyond itself.
The artist compares the fragmentation of wooden architecture with the fragmentation of text or code. The arch is also typical of sacred architecture, often denoting a boundary or transition, and wooden architecture involves working with layers, posing the question of how these layers erase over time. For Chernyshev, though, the arch is not a sacred image, but rather an illustration of the idea of two-worldism, an oneiric expression of the incomprehensible, the liminal, the hidden.
As Walter Benjamin wrote in his Arcades Project: "One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld – a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise”. Like one of Chernyshev's recent site-specific installations, The Castle (2024, Nizhny Novgorod, shown in the slide documentation), the Rooted Rainbows appear before the viewer like a vision of another world, signifying a split, a border of the world, the existence of otherness that shines through our reality.
