Alchemy. New coal A/P II
“The works from the series “Subjects united by a common horizontal line” were conceived as illustrations for the stories of Erasmus of Rotterdam, collected under the title “Conversations at Leisure.”
The initial idea seemed exceptionally simple — to read the text and create several etchings based on it, illustrating the dialogues from the book. The simplicity of this concept turned out to be deceptive. Into the small gap located between reading and drawing, the entire original meaning of the text would leak away, and only a few of the most basic images, strung together around a particular action, would remain “in hand.” Passed through various stages of the creative process, the final images became more about the sensations evoked by reading than literal illustrations. All these metamorphoses also influenced the choice of titles for the works. The paired phrases, the first of which is the original title of the “conversation,” and the second is a phrase from the text that may have influenced the visual image, are intended to create an additional extradimensional dimension for the works, to layer what is happening on the page—but not graphically, but semantically.
In order not to be carried away into the abyss of interpretations and fantasies, I clung to the horizon. Not only the chosen printing technique, but also the formal kinship of all the works in the series, combined with the diversity of their internal content, and the strictly defined relationship between the spaces of heaven and earth, make it possible to unite the scattered fragments of the plots into a single fabric.”
Nikon Filippov
He is an artist in whose practice traditional easel forms coexist with the visual experience of digital culture. In 2016, he graduated from the All-Russian State University of Cinematography named after S. A. Gerasimov (VGIK) with a degree in Animation and Multimedia Artist. He is a participant of the Škola crew project, which brings together artists and musicians.
Filippov's artistic language has been shaped under the influence of comics, animation, book illustration, television advertising, and family photo archives. He regards these diverse visual sources as fragments of collective and personal experience that accumulate and are transformed in the contemporary culture of the image.
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