Andrey Syaylev

The alchemy of Andrey Syaylev’s Dadaist contraptions transforms profane building materials into metaphors of reflective intuitions. A fan becomes a clock that speeds up in the viewer’s presence. Ruined bricks come to resemble the imaginary book archives of humankind. The surface of oriented strand board (OSB) gains depth, illuminated from within by the azure hue of sacred frescoes.
Setting these metamorphoses in motion, the artist reads the present historical moment as a mass of matter whose density is felt as pressure by those living through it. Information flows, crowding out eventfulness, build up into the white noise of time.
 
Contemporary artists observe that we have to keep forgetting in order to stay sane. Collective memory is composed of innumerable acts of forgetting. This is how the image contracts into a diagram. The flow of time disperses and settles like epidermis, never disappearing without a trace. Dust has its agents of dispersal and collection. Waste becomes an archive, acquiring a timeless value.
 
By visualizing informational noise together with processes of dispersion and crystallization, Andrey Syaylev’s practice seeks to show, through simple forms, how collective experience, agitated in the moment, ultimately settles into the material layers of the world as condensed cultural sediment: a segment, a gradient.

Konstantin Zatsepin