© All copyright remains with Ilya Romano
© All copyright remains with Ilya Romano
© All copyright remains with Ilya Romano
© All copyright remains with Ilya Romano
© All copyright remains with Ilya Romano
© All copyright remains with Ilya Romano
© All copyright remains with Ilya Romano
© All copyright remains with Ilya Romano
© All copyright remains with Ilya Romano
ILYA ROMANOV - SURFACE
Ilya Romanov is a young artist fascinated by natural surfaces, and for this exhibition he has created a two-meter object covered with patterns in relief. It is a blank slate that becomes imbued with meaning at the moment of encounter, and Romanov also draws parallels with the spiritualist practice of automatic writing. In spiritualist art, the hand of the artist is guided by an otherworldly force, and an artist thus “inspired” is merely a medium. In the 19th century, automatic writing was popular among non-professional artists – Victor Hugo created a large quantity of spiritualist drawings, for example. Spiritualist practices have often led to what we know as Outsider Art, with practitioners including Rafael Lanne, Jannet Trippie, Lora Pijon and Madge Gill. The defining feature of their work is interweaving lines, patterns and decorative elements.
Many avant-garde artists and formalists in search of a natural language turned their attention to Outsider Art, primitive art and automatic writing. Duchamp called the artist a medium, Kandinsky addressed himself to theosophy, Matyushin held seances, and the Oberiu group were fascinated by ether and tried to free themselves from cultural constructs. One way or another, they all sought connection and to escape the bounds of their own bodies. Ilya Romanov does not concern himself directly with spiritualist practices, and is more interested in an exploration of natural materials. Nevertheless he has made his natural surfaces, landscapes and decorative elements into a kind of guide for his own hand. In this context we might recall Nikolai Zabolotsky, who called on every person to follow “the path of the beetle” and surrender to natural rhythms. It is not important to know the subject of the work in as much as form itself has here become the subject. Thanks to Romanov’s nameless and unnamed patterns the work becomes like a Rorschach test, a game of intepretation with a collective consciousness (of which the audience is a part).
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© All copyright remains with Ilya Romanov