Chelushkin Kirill

According to Kirill Chelushkin, A Happy Man is a discourse about the brief instances in life when a person experiences happiness in spite of the circumstances. This feeling manifests itself at the most

unexpected times.

It isn't affected by external and sometimes dismal everyday or emotional circumstances. A person can have these happy moments even during tragic or fateful turns of events. The mind inexplicably fragments reality, so happiness is interpreted as a side effect of something else you are doing or a certain event.

It is based on a recipe with unpredictable ingredients, diverse and difficult to analyze, but each variation has to be catalogued. This exhibition proclaims a mock-macabre positive view of hardship described in the language of catastrophic

realism – the art of finding everything positive in the absurdities and troubles of life.

Through this series, Kirill Chelushkin questions the processes at work in the recognition of the visible world. His large graphite pencil drawings are realistic in style but what is at play in them traps the perceptual system – the figures depicted oscillate between the familiar and the unknown, forcing the viewer into an inner focus that will remain unsatisfied. The elements that make up the image remain unrecognizable, inoperative from the point of view of identification, indefinable. Everyone experiences the perception of what surrounds them in a unique way. But the interpretation of sensory information nevertheless obeys a certain number of common codes, which allow the whole of a population to identify the beacons of its sensory universe and by extension, of its intelligible universe: what the individual understands the world and its place in it.