Within the framework of the celebration, the exhibitions "Portrait of a Teacher" and the personal exposition of Ermolaev "Through the Eyes of Nature" have already been held. The current exhibition "The Way", which can be visited until October 30, tells about the thirty-year activity of the student circle, which today has grown into an independent architectural and design studio. It presents the works of both Alexander Pavlovich himself and his students. This is not the first TAF exhibition, but it compares favorably with all the previous ones with its location. According to one of the visitors, this is the first experience of placing TAF's works in a space that is congenial to them. The fact is that the studio's past exhibitions were held in classical halls with white walls, which made each object perceived as a kind of challenge, while the interior of the Clumba Gallery itself bears a touch of a kind of "Yermolaevism", and therefore each exhibit looks authentic here. In the small space of the gallery, a huge number of objects, drawings and photographs are displayed. By the way, Ermolaev made the exhibition as a kind of visual aid for his students. Numerous explications, telling about the main values and philosophy of TAF, added to the "educational" of the exposition.
A monograph was published for the same educational purpose. The idea for the book belongs to Aleksandr Pavlovich's student, now also a teacher at the Moscow Architectural Institute, Elena Tarutina. 6 years ago, sorting through the archives in the studio, she found a huge number of graphic sheets by Ermolaev and wanted to publish them, because, according to her, everyone should be able to “touch these works, feel them and live”. As a result, pictorial and graphic works made up only one volume of the monograph, the other two are devoted to works that, as the author himself writes, "have in common materiality, objectivity, often woodiness", and texts that give him the opportunity to understand what he is. However, this does not mean that the first volume does not carry any discoveries - on the contrary, his numerous admirers are familiar with Ermolaev, first of all, as a designer and architect, and only now, after the publication of the monograph, the general public will be able to recognize him as unique in his brevity, archetypal and the imagery of the artist.
In the second volume, the works are not grouped chronologically - they are united by cross-cutting motives and plots, as well as a specific "author's" typology, for example, "trifles", "those that can decorate life" and "pretentious". Interestingly, the latter are often combinations of, for example, a washboard, rusty metal and plastic debris. Oleg Genisaretsky, Alexander Lavrentyev, Elena Sidorina, Elena Chernevich, Galina Kuryerova became the authors of the third volume, which contains art criticism articles about the personality and work of Ermolaev.
But, of course, Ermolaev himself remains the main narrator of the monograph. Telling his biography in detail, the architect recalls that his interest in design woke up in his second year at the institute, when he studied the legacy of constructivism and the expressive means of futurism. Ermolaev admits that at first he looked at the world through the eyes of one artist or another, but then he himself learned to feel the spirit of the spatial-objective situation, discovered creativity for himself as an artistic play with materials, forms, space. Ermolaev plays to this day. He keenly feels the laws of nature, and in his rules to follow them - that is why there is no such deliberate "made-up" in his objects.
As the president of the Moscow Architectural Institute, Alexander Kudryavtsev, said about him at the presentation of the book: “Ermolaev surprisingly opens everyone's eyes to the beautiful side of the ugly world. There is no other person who could make an amazing exhibition out of rubbish, and a book from waste paper. " The artist himself says that his works do not embody any specific intentions, they arise by accident as sensual reactions to natural materials or artifacts. Well, the contemplation of these "unintentional" objects brings great pleasure to a wide circle of admirers of Ermolaev's talent. By the way, the presentation of the book and the exhibition attracted a huge number of spectators - there was literally nowhere to step in the gallery hall.
Many of those who came are former students of Ermolaev, because over the 30 years of the existence of the Theater of Architectural Forms, more than a dozen of Alexander Pavlovich's students and followers have left it. Therefore, at the evening, quite predictably, there were more than once reviews of the creator of TAF as a teacher - a Teacher in the broadest sense of the word, able to convey the skill of an unbiased and creative perception of the world. For this gift Ermolaev, in particular, thanked the deputy director of the architectural bureau "Ostozhenka" Andrei Gnezdilov: “I work with graduates of TAF, and these people are fundamentally different from others. They have a different vision, that of a tracker. They have an amazing hunter feeling. And this is your merit, because this is the gene that you are implanting”.
