Back

About how it is drawn 

This question — HOW — is indeed very serious. 4 There is no drawing at all. Ultimately, drawing is life ’ language. It is your understanding of space, form,! surface, your attitude to everything. To be able to I draw is parallel to your ability to speak, and conse-| quently, to understand the world in which you live. I And another very important reason WHAT fori If there is reason WHAT for, then, surely, there will be HOW as well. WHAT for is the plastic interest and plastic perception of life.

Accuracy in perceptions

I don't like talking about the beauteous. Actually, I have a complicated relationship with a beauty. For me, much more important is the accuracy. This may not be confused with a similarity. The accuracy of personal feelings. The accuracy in the transfer into the material.

For me, it is very strange to hear quotes like: "But this is how I see it..." I understand this as an absolute profanation of the subject. Somewhat more understandable is for me the phrase "This is how I understand it..." This is closer to the truth. Although even this is quite debatable. My point is, all people see the same, but their relation to the seen is different, this is true. And understanding of the seen is similarly dissimilar.

What defines an artist? I think it is his personal attitude to the categories including colour, shape, surface, space, line, texture, and interaction of all these components together, the rhythm. 


About "What" and "How"

Dmitry Ikonnikov’s solo exhibition "Fabric of Time" at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, prepared with the participation of Heritage International Art Gallery, presented three cycles of works. The first one shows a seamstress diligently working on her dilapidated Zinger sewing machine The first one was devoted to the seamstress diligently working on a dilapidated Singer sewing machine, where a simple story overgrows the everyday level of meaning and becomes a kind of universal encyclopedia of life. This life is the very "fabric of time", where every stitch and every thread matters. With title "Male Stories", the second cycle presented characters meeting each other in shabby backyards, seated on crates or at tables in the amusement park. The third cycle is dedicated to Paris and "il dolce far niente" on the seashores of Mediterranean Sea in Croatia and Montenegro. Ikonnikov presents these places, especially the capital of France, as "dreams that came true" and as the embodiment of "dreams of something bigger." Other works from St. Petersburg surprisingly combine the everyday, prosaic nature of the Moscow cycles and the sublime dreaminess of the Paris series.

Dmitry Ikonnikov
2011

Back