Chelushkin Kirill

The state is broken — the mountains and rivers remain.

It's spring in the city, and the grass and trees are thick.

From time to time, grieving, the flowers splash with tears.

Hating separation, birds disturb the heart. Spring view / 春望:Yao Hua. 576g. The artist is still trying to produce a sign of hope. The emptiness of nature is not like a decoration, but like a philosophical machine. In this system, man is not the master of the world, but a temporary point inside the cosmos. He sits, watches, tries. The method of thinking in space. Landscape as an ontology. There is a term in architecture — prestressed construction, this is when it is clear that just a straight beam will not withstand the load, it is pre-bent so that the bending force works against the load force, but everything looks calm, everything is beautiful so far. Not a single beast is visible, but you are visible to the beast. Because the hunt is on for you. The beast must not be left without prey.

Text: Kirill Chelushkin

The language of art grows with edges, is renewed by the germination of sown marginalia. Chelushkin's proto-novel bases the anthropological, technocratic, and corporeal using memorable optics. Such an optical tuning system brings sharpness to the most decanonized and therefore free images, motifs and mise-en-scenes, replenishing the world of the author's depository. The poetics of non–recognition changes the inertia of our gaze, knocks down value polarization, and cancels the hierarchy of meaningful-accidental. To sharpen an object that the draftsman needs means to master the mechanism of the viewer's attention, such a function in the film process is performed by a focus puller, or magician. Based on the point at which the focus was focused and mentally finding the source of focus, we discover the artist's position. The intentionality of such a search sets the direction of the unpainted painting, pushes towards unrecognized spaces behind the white fields of existing drawings, which turned out to be accessible to the viewer and therefore were designated the main objects of attention. But they are also marginal in relation to the invisible meaning lying in the blind spot. Kirill Chelushkin is so consistently and reliably building up the map of our world at the edges that its center is already noticeably shifting.

Anton Ouspensky

...Chelushkin has an absolute ear for gradations of chiaroscuro. You don't have to light a lamp to make the light shine. Light arises from darkness when a skillful hand begins to arrange its tones and gradually a dim and then brighter ray breaks through from this order, as in the engravings of Dore, who masterfully depicted the battles of light and darkness in his biblical cycle.

Sensitivity to chiaroscuro gradations allowed Chelushkin to reach a new level of conceptualization of this phenomenon, but in physical reality. By separating the screen and the light, he himself answers the question he posed in one of his installations: what did I manage to understand about light and shadow?

Konstantin Bokhorov (art critic, curator, among his projects are exhibitions at international biennales in Venice, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Moscow; lecturer at the British Higher School of Design)