the turquoise ether magazine’s mission is to publish independent critical reviews of promising artists from over The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)

Turquoise #18 | Vladimir Logutov (Russia)

Konstantin Zatsepin’s essay on the exhibition of Vladimir Logutov “Open studio” as an example of the artist’s internal dialogue with his own creative methodology. The exhibition was held at the SPHERE Contemporary Art Foundation (Moscow) in September 2021.

Vladimir Logutov reconfigures in each of his exhibitions the distances between the signifiers that we see and the signified that escapes from us. Manipulating the viewer’s attention and convincing that everything he looks at is not what it seems. Visually Logutov’s works tend towards minimal art and lightness. They work as uninterrupted devices of aesthetic influence, presenting to a potential interpreter a significant non-redundancy of artistic gesture — one-toone correspondence of the formal machinery to the author’s task.

This time, this task was the creative process model. Logutov is faithful to post-conceptualist optics with its absolute author’s meta-position and revisionist view of modernist visuality as amenable material. The artist makes a preparation of the resources of his own studio, sorting through photo fragments, brushworks, spots, colourful downflows, icons, patterns, and other “rubbish from which poems grow”. As a result, it is these occasional draft visual fragments, as if taken from the basket instead of being permanently deleted, that form the work itself.

The analogy with the poetic form was laid down by the author himself — the artist combines elements into syntactic pairs-rhymes of images that differ in medium. Texture painting is found in the same plane, sometimes with digital graphics, sometimes with a photo. In addition, each of the techniques often simulates its opposite.

The resulting “visual poetry” at the same time refers both to the image of the book as a spread of two equivalent pages, and to musical sampling. The hanging of works on the wall itself reminds of an audio editor with parallel tracks or a timeline in a table. “Reading” — comparison of pairs occurs not only horizontally, but also vertically — thus, the exhibition structurally appeals to language in its syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions.

The exhibition key procedure is comparison — both the forms themselves and the ways of their representation. Perhaps, in the aggregate of all possible pair combinations from the exhibition, one can only speak of a certain form that it has. Particularly, we deal only with images without a form. It is contemplative, delayed, it has yet to be created, including through collective efforts. The process of recombining pictures in pairs was also delegated to the viewers at the opening — two stacks of large canvases standing parallel to the wall repeatedly transformed, which put emphasis on the random nature of the final visual rhyme.

The largest object in the exhibition became a vertical screw as a means of fastening various surfaces. By the way, the size of the screw (floor-to-ceiling) surpassing the viewer was combined with ephemeralness — its image was printed on a voile fabric. Like the background that repeats true to size the interior of a conditional studio. Calling this work “Large Voile” in a manner similar to “Large Glass” of Marcel Duchamp, the artist draws a line of continuity with the Dadaist collage, and also works with the idea of transparency — in that part where Duchamp had glass, Logutov has a screen print, whose plane is accentuated by digital fuzzy touch of a finger. Before us there is an illusion that speaks of the inescapable distance between the depicted and the visible, which, once again, are compared with each other.

“New is simple,” the artist writes in the exhibition introduction, stylized as an instructive statement. What does he mean by “new”? It sounds like the answer lies in his previous phrase: “an obsession with the idea of the unparalleled.” That is to say, that which has no equal, and thus is devoid of a pair, does not fit into the series of comparisons.

It is about the uneasy appearance of this elusive mysterious proto-image, the “Great Work” through multiple fragments of small ones, that Vladimir Logutov’s exhibition, apparently not without nostalgia, with its carefully staged “simplicity of novelty” tells about.

Konstantin Zatsepin (b. 1980, Samara Region, Russia) is a curator and critic who lives and works in Samara. He has written on contemporary art for the Moscow Art Magazine, the New Literary Observer and DI. He is the author of The Visual Space (2016) and edited the collection The Anatomy of the Art Scene (2015).

Vladimir Logutov was born in Samara (Russia) in 1980. Artist, curator. Author of about two dozen solo exhibitions in Russia and Europe (Berlin, Paris, Stuttgart, Birmingham). Participant in the major international projects in the field of contemporary art. In 2012, Logutov was a participant in the main project “Invisible” at the 4th Guangzhou Triennial, (China). In 2014 he participated in the main project of the 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. In 2010, the artist’s works were presented at the exhibition “Modernikon”. Fondanzione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy. And next year, as part of the presentation of the Modernnikon project at the 54th Venice Biennale. At the next, 55th Venice Biennale, artist was presented as part of the Lost in Translation project. And also in the exhibition “The Way of Enthusiasts” within the framework of the 13th architectural biennale in Vinezia. In 2020, he was a participant in the 2nd Triennial of Russian Art at the Garage Museum, Moscow. Artist’s works are both in private and museum collections, including collections of The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, FRAC Bretagne Museum (Rennes, France) and others. Vladimir Logutov is laureate of the Innovation Prize — 2018, Artist of the Year. Laureate of the Joseph Brodsky Prize. As a visual artist. 2018. Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in 2019.