The exhibition of graphic architectural fantasies by Vyacheslav Petrenko opens up for new generations the master who stood at the origins of the conceptual architecture of Russia. With his work, the artist shows that the boundaries of species and genres are a conditional thing. In a great work of any era, a universe is created in which all nine muses of world culture undergo metamorphoses, exchange ideas.
Architect Vyacheslav Petrenko lived a very short life: the same as Mozart - 35 years (1947-1982). According to the recollections of relatives and close friends (wife of Alexandra Petrenko, architect Andrei Bokov, writer Nikolai Chuksin), one can understand that the light, light genius of Mozart's music seemed to overshadow Petrenko's personality. Its architecture is similar to scores. However, if we use the winged metaphor of Goethe and Schelling (architecture is frozen music), then the music of these scores never sounded. Not a single building designed by Petrenko was built.
Nevertheless, the very notation of the notes is not the act of the birth of a composition, a melody that sounds in the minds of those who can read, listen and feel? Often this intelligible music is closer to the ideal than actually performed. So it is with the "notations" of Vyacheslav Petrenko: the metaphysical existence of his projects (only on paper) can captivate and delight much more than those buildings that were made in the most hopeless time for the country's architecture - during the Soviet stagnation.
Became a generally accepted term, which is called such scores sounding only in the personal perception of architecture: "paper". There is only one year left before the 30th anniversary of this trend, if we consider it the beginning of the exact date: August 1, 1984, when the first exhibition titled “Paper Architecture” was opened in the editorial office of the Yunost magazine. Representatives of this style, which was born in spite of the architectural routine of the 80s, are now heard: Alexander Brodsky, Mikhail Khazanov, Ilya Utkin, Totan Kuzembaev … The main chronicler, archivist, curator of exhibitions on the history of the movement, at the same time its active participant is Yuri Avvakumov. For a long time on the site
www.utopia.ru contains a depository compiled by him, which contains the main projects of "paper architecture", the history of which Avvakumov begins with unrealized projects of the Age of Enlightenment, from the Bazhenov Kremlin Palace, for example. Yuri Avvakumov also curated exhibitions of paper architecture with works by Vyacheslav Petrenko. I even remember one personal exhibition of Petrenko's works within the framework of the Arch of Moscow in 2002, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the master's death.
In my opinion, the concept that unites the work of "paper architects" of the 80s with the best utopian architectural projects in general is borrowed from the world of music. It is an invention - the ability to create compositions similar to capriccios: unexpected, intellectually subtle and delightfully erudite. The works of Vyacheslav Petrenko are endowed with the intention to the invention in full.
The main project of the exhibition: Sailing Center in Tallinn. In the catalog article, Yuri Avvakumov does not accidentally compare it with the "Ten Books on Architecture" by Mark Vitruvius Pollion. The project and the process of working on it recorded in many sketches and engravings is a whole philosophy of architecture, which allows you to understand how rooted the architect is in world culture and how modern, endowed with the gift of erasing conventional boundaries, ensuring the interpenetration of various languages of art.
The leitmotif of Vyacheslav Petrenko's work in general and work on the Center in particular: to create a space-universe in which various themes of “stringing an architectural volume onto the lines of force of the world” would be clearly embodied (the wording in one of the master's notebooks). In the topic of the Center, Petrenko turned to several sources. First: the ancient Roman terms, thought to be the focal point of life in its physical and intellectual mode, as well as the meeting place of the primordial elements - water, air, heat (sun) and earthly space. The second is amazingly witty (here it is, the invention) found in the preparatory sketches and the final design of the Sailing Center. This is an appeal to the design of Roman aqueducts and the image of the sail on the galleys. Petrenko fills the gigantic arches of aqueducts that go under the water with a building mass and turns them into a kind of inflated sails that structure the composition of the building. Moreover, these sails form a gigantic flat wall and visually testify to the reciprocity of the absence of form and its presence. We keep a visual memory of the aqueduct as a wall with gigantic voids cut through - arches. At the same time, we see how dense sails are blown up in the place of the voids in the new aqueduct. The third formative source of the Sailing Center is, of course, the Russian avant-garde in a completely phenomenal dialogue with medieval Gothic. One sketch shows the horizontal skyscraper of El Lissitzky. Another engraving shows an axonometric diagram and a “cut” facade, which expresses the inner essence of a developing, horizontally and vertically stepped building. So a horizontal skyscraper becomes at the same time flying buttresses and buttresses.
Each spatial sector of Petrenko conceived as an area of meeting of different arts in accordance with some ideal constants of human existence. And all the arts (you can see that the sculptures' drawings resemble the creations of Henry Moore) work for the maximum embodiment of the always accurate design solution.
Invented and embodied on paper, spatial images are also a remarkably witty test in the psychology of the perception of form in different languages of art. Everyone recognizes the sheet "Marc Chagall Square" as a masterpiece. Above the square, like an arched lintel, hangs a transparent pool. And the bathers cast shadows on the floor of the square. Here one cannot but consider quite definite allusions: Vyacheslav Petrenko himself, in his comments, recalled the Chagall people flying overhead (the figures of those bathing in a transparent pool). Another reference is de Chirico with his infernal shadows in the squares.
Many cultural allusions are a separate theme of Petrenko's work. One segment of the Center is called the "staircase of the raised old women". Old women meet on balconies and gossip. This topic, of course, is Oberiut, but with a happy outcome. And the "gallery of the absence of an inner glance", like others, emphasized by the characteristic style of graphics, is the inevitability of a meeting with Moscow conceptualism and Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov.
The installation of the visual material of the Center, the inevitability of the eye sliding along different perspective schemes, diving into traps, valves, pockets of various light-air zones is, of course, involved in cinema aesthetics. However, in the version of rather graphic animation, which just in those years became an art, where experiment was allowed and the avant-garde methods of form creation were alive (remember the cartoons of Andrei Khrzhanovsky, Yuri Norshtein, Fyodor Khitruk …). Moreover, I am sure that many works of both Moscow conceptual artists and Moscow conceptual architects-wallets are associated with the cartoon style of the Soviet 70-80s.
Such a variety of themes and meanings gives rise to acquaintance with the architecture of Vyacheslav Petrenko. So his art is not just one frozen melody, it is a seething, mighty oratorio or even Wagner's bequeathed GesamtKunstWerk.
P. S. But why is the exposition called "Platform of Inaccessibility"? Let's give the floor to the organizers of the exhibition: “PLATFORM OF DISABILITY - one of the many concepts of Petrenko, who offered people a way to retire on the city square while maintaining full visual contact with other people. Tearing off the platform from the ground, he brings a column under it, turning the structure into a pedestal, and the lovers of solitude who climbed on it - into a kind of monuments. The main idea of the project is that the temporary easily gets along with the eternal. The creative path of Vyacheslav Petrenko, so short, but in fact turned to infinity, is an indisputable proof of this statement."
The exhibition is open in the Pharmaceutical Order of the Museum of Architecture until March 14.
