Denikin Sergey

Artist Sergey Denisov has been working for several decades to create a thin-walled but hermetic world in which shadows and glare play no less a role than the objects that cast them. Through his painstakingly assembled collages, installations and objects, an extrahuman reality shines through, the temporality of which is tuned to the rhythm of smooth natural processes, like the unfolding of a leaf or the sedate smoothing of insect wings, decompressing from the state of a larva or pupa. Each of his works is a fragment of the process taking place in this self—organized laboratory. The basis for Denisov's works are the objects of his ever-growing collection: mica plates, clippings of diagrams from scientific journals, twigs and herbariums, devices for chemical experiments. This material allows the artist to enhance the authenticity of the physiology of the creatures he invented and at the same time show the difficulty of defining the boundaries of the living and the inanimate. The transition of this boundary towards life in Denisov's works is usually marked by the appearance of eyes and eyespots, as if the author uses scientific experiments demonstrating that human infants focus their gaze on a triangle of lips and two pupils for the first time. A character who acquires eyes is not excluded from natural cycles, but is forced to respond emotionally to the processes in which he is involved even before individuation.

Transparency, fragility and weightlessness are qualities that Denikin appreciates and reveals in the materiality of his works, at the same time forming a coordinate system within which the figurative series of a particular exhibition is built. Scenes, plots, and characters (as far as they can be discussed in a particular case) are just one of the components of the visual art of the work. Guided by the artist, the pupil overcomes this layer, focusing on the shadows and reflexes cast by the conventional visual space into the three-dimensional world. This is an important point — what is happening on the surface of a collage or sculpture is multiplying, and it cannot be said that the primary thing is an image that works like a slide, its projection on the wall or the reflections cast on the ceiling.

The word nastia (included in the title of the exhibition) is just the movements performed by plants in response to external influences: light, touch, temperature changes.

Alexander Dashevsky