Andrey Volkov
Andrey Syaylev
Anya Zholud
Anton Konukhov

The Repressed within Meanings

In the contemporary world, the production and consumption of meanings take precedence. Meanings congeal and proliferate, overlaying one another and knotting into opaque tangles of simulacra, demanding ever-new representations. Within this hyper-consumption of sense, where “relevance” reigns supreme, everything begins to stratify, easily acquiring the stamp of the “ultra-contemporary,” and just as easily sheds it, turning into “waste” and slipping out of our attention.

PA Gallery’s booth reflects on the sedimentation of meanings. Anya Zholud lays bare the conduits — severed connective elements left to rust and, it seems, beyond repair. Rigid metal rods fossilize these conduits, emphasizing their discarded status within the contemporary context.
 
The centerpiece of the booth is Andrey Syaylev’s “Fountain: The Present Moment”: a water pump enlarged to pedestal scale and functioning as a fountain. This “monument” to the familiar village water pump, which may strike city dwellers as a relic of the past, commemorates the strange, transitional time between what is passing and what is yet to come, the time we live in today and always.
Anton Konyukhov’s large-scale work, continuing the theme of fossils, takes the form of an imprint of the plastic sheeting that typically covers empty display windows. It is a distinctive trace of life processes, not so much a practical measure for the present, but rather a medium capable of registering, more or less literally, life itself as it unfolds on the surface of the present.

Andrey Volkov’s abstract canvases, in the spirit of radical painting, liberate color, paint, and the painterly gesture from accreted meanings. His works resist interpretation and thus slip out of contemporaneity while still remaining within the orbit of today’s art discourse (radical painting still retains a certain popularity). They inhabit a parallel, purely painterly reality.

Another parallel reality is Andrey Syaylev’s “Bricks of Reality”, created at the intersection of the real and the virtual. The bricks depict books produced by various neural networks in response to a prompt about the most important books in human history. This set of “volumes” proves to be a simulacrum of history, enclosed within the human nature of generating meanings that often spiral back into a loop of simulation.

Kirill Eltsov