The exhibition presents a project devoted to the birth of text in a new, visual-graphic plane of perception. Three artists are taking part in the project: Ivars Gravlejs from Prague, Mikhail Most from Moscow and Andrey Syaylev from Samara. All of the works presented at the exhibition are united by a common conception of the substitution of the text with visual material; examining the borders of these two worlds, the authors juggle with meanings, conveying an impetus of play to the spectator.

The exhibition\’s focal point is a work by Andrey Syaylev titled “Cube”. The cube itself is formed from books and is, in essence, “a heap of text.” In this work, the text itself, taking on a sculptural form, is dragged into a three-dimensional space. Another series of works by Andrey Syaylev, “Content”, comprises painted canvases depicting bookshelves, balancing on the edge between the abstract and the figurative. Mikhail Most\’s work “Dialogs” features six canvases. This series presents a geometric abstraction based on blocks of text where the headlines and entire paragraphs are hidden under a layer of paint and transformed into color rectangles. Ivarsa Gravlejs\’s artistic instrument in the series “Shopping Poetry” is the conveyor belt for goods at a supermarket. Putting goods on it in a specific sequence, the author plays with the titles and rhymes all manner of products, creating a conceptual literary work on the bill. In the process, a unique “consumer” poem is created.

The works by the artists presented at the exhibition, in one way or another, shed light on the inter-penetration of the image and the word and the merging of visual and textual origins. The book is no longer merely a carrier of text; it is not only turned into a visual media, it becomes in itself a material for creative work. The text is no longer simply a sequence of established symbols, it is now a visual image. Acquiring a visualization, it passes into a three-dimensional space and acquires within it a material “body.”

Vladimir Logutov