Smoke

The phenomenon of the city began to be actively interested in art only from the late 19th – early 20th centuries, when their active development and undeniable influence on people could no longer be ignored. In turn, the focus is not on the city as the totality and concentration of different objects, buildings and topos, but on the city as a symbolic space that each person has to interact with.
A city is a complex system of functions, relationships, values, structures that are pushed by anyone who gets into its orbit. I do not undertake their tracking and detection – all these phenomena are reduced and taken out of bounds – while the main creative intention is to search for the boundary states of this dialogue (its extremes), when confronting the interlocutors break into cry and hysteria or infantile silence, each other in a hug or indifferently disagree. The artistic expression of these states were images on the one hand – the station, roads and tracks, and on the other – the plant, pipes and smoke.

Finding themselves and realizing themselves as part of the urban whole, everyone understands that this is the urban only – not an empty space, in which are located some things, but a living topos with its mythology, with its face and language. The works remind us that dialogue with such a complex and large-scale organism is not an equal conversation. The city leaves prints on visitors, recycles its residents, assimilates. It is able to absorb a person, leaving only the shadow, the outline and the smoke.

What then? – Station and run away? But where is it?

The performative response of the artist is in his own work. Only through aesthetic discourse can one penetrate into the essence of a city that has also been discovered and articulated in a work of art. You can save yourself and speak with the city on an equal footing, but only in the language of art.