Walls
2012

Alexandra Paperno’s Walls portrays walls “portraying” things. A wall is a sensitive surface, one upon which the combination of light and time imprints the outline of an object – its photogram, if you will. In depicting walls, Paperno simply transfers that photogram onto the canvas.

This “simply,” however, contains a sum of concordances between the repetition and the form, the reality and the perceived picture, the entire discipline of the primal and minimal artistic gesture. The surface of the painting fills out the same way a wall fills out and ages; in other words, the depiction, while remaining itself, also assumes the qualities of the depicted. These paintings thus take, and embody, a long view – not only in terms of the time it took to produce them, but in their very density, compressed into weightlessness. The long view embodied in the organization of the painterly mass, which coaxes the eye past the surface and backwards in time, until the very notion of time is negated and only the distance is left.

As it recedes, that which is technically a still life becomes something more like a landscape. An object becomes space, matter becomes abstraction. But this transformation stops on the brink – where the balanced opposites reveal new perspectives of contemplation.

Vladimir Levashov
Translated by Carleton Copeland

PDF of a catalogue «Alexandra Paperno. Parietes»

 

Exhibition views at the solo show «Parietes», Lapidarium Museum, Cittanova/Novigrad, Croatia, 2010
More info about the exhibition

 

Third Moscow Biennale of Architecture. Parallel Programme. Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, 2012

Exhibition views by Yuri Palmin