Andrey Volkov

The Latin word linea originally referred to a flax thread, a cord that connects and binds, or,  if used figuratively, a chain of interconnected objects. Linea Uno (Line One, First Line, or Line No. 1) is an imagined cord that joins objects and events of primary significance. It's purpose is  to  connect the parts of one's experience that normally defy juxtaposition: fragments of  visual or emotional memories, hereditary patterns, acquired skills, physical movements, entities material and fictional. It is the creative process' guideline, helping more to  ask the  right questions than to find answers.

The term Linea Uno is borrowed from a Venetian public transit route, which connects the  city's extreme outlying points, traversing the downtown along the Grand Canal. The name was borrowed following a succession of actions that varied in their degree of randomness/intentionality.

A plastic vaporetto tablet for Route No.1 was once fished out of the canal water between the stops Giardini and Giardini Biennale after a nighttime storm. With time, what was initially perceived as a precious souvenir, a memento, came to mean much more and loom much larger.

The concept of "route" implies a strict consecutive order, but only when viewed on it's own, in isolation. How and to what extent the route will be relevant hinges on personal, and not necessarily rational, choices. It is up to the individual to make their choice of where to balance between the previously determined and spontaneity. Every person is free to choose where their travel will begin, in which direction it will progress, how many stops to pass, and where to finally disembark. This is very much akin to the perception process during painting as I understand it.

The relevance of the Linea Uno idea is further vindicated by the fact that non-objective painting has been rightfully ascribed the properties of a means of transport: "I have always just felt that… if one chooses to look at paintings as vehicles to take you to some other place… abstract painting was much more open, and therefore could take you to more complicated places". (Brice Marden)

The closer a painting approaches its essential properties, the  more freedom it grants the viewer to have an experience. This experience is a form of being that exists between the viewer and the painting. The painting is a thing in itself – not an abstraction, not a text, but a primal experience, both active and relevant, existing in the here and now.

Paint is one of the primary carriers of meaning: the pigment and the binding agents are the ultimate materialization of color, whether occurring in the form of delicate and for all intents and purposes transparent layers, or as a color monolith with a claim to three-dimensionality, their mission is to reify color. Paint is not the building material of a painting; it is a substance with it's own content that lives a life of it's own. Your gaze must touch the paint: only through this psychophysical interaction does a painting make sense, becoming an experience of vision"