The Moscow gallery A-3 is hosting the Estrin Code exhibition. Its subtitle is: "Everything You Wanted to Know About an Architect, But Were Shy to Ask." The exhibition was curated by a young art critic Anastasia Dokuchaeva. Together with Estrin, she chose to exhibit mainly graphic works: in different techniques and different materials. And she was not mistaken.
In the small rooms of the cozy gallery, one gets the impression that he got inside a folder with sheets of architectural graphics from different eras. Only they are not laid out on the table carefully and without breathing, but, bending the edges, they crunch the sheets into a pile, achieving the movement of the pictures, like in a cartoon. The animation effect of the restless, moving, wayward architecture at the exhibition is stunning. Sergey Estrin is a wonderful practicing architect, and in graphics he is a true virtuoso. He can paint scherzo and capriccio on anything and anything. When you look at its towers, bridges, arches, vaults made with felt-tip pen, ink, charcoal, pencils, pen, gold leaf on paper, plexiglass, corrugated cardboard, craft paper, tracing paper, it seems as if the whole history of architecture that came to life is rustling in front of you. and spun in a passionate dance.
It is symbolic that the exhibition "The Estrin Code" is held almost simultaneously with the exposition at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts "Paper Architecture. End of the story. " On the example of Estrin, you understand that the 30th anniversary of the "wallets" (his ideologist Yuri Avvakumov considers the date of the movement to be August 1, 1984, when an exhibition entitled "Paper Architecture" was opened in the editorial office of the magazine "Yunost") is not the end, but the time of maturity itself and flourishing. With the classics of Soviet and post-Soviet "wallets" (Brodsky, Utkin, Avvakumov, Belov, Filippov, Zosimov) Estrina has in common the virtuosity of the development of the topic, refined design thinking and a passion for postmodern, citation-based discourse. For example, the title itself and the subtitle of the exposition are already ringing with hidden quotes: to two fashion films, the revised names of which are used "in the tail and in the mane", making them a recognizable designer brand. At the essential level, the postmodern connotations of Sergey Estrin's graphics are quite convincing.
Of course, it's great that both the wallets in the Pushkin Museum and Estrin trace their historical countdown to their graphic culture from the decorators of the baroque theater (Valeriani, the Bibiena family, Gonzaga). Their pen-executed major and minor scherzos with colonnades, palace enfilades and gloomy dungeons legitimize the genre of "panarchitecture", which sweeps aside the pedantic classification of "baroque", "neoclassicism", "pre-romanticism". The sovereign of this theatrical empire is, of course, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, with whom Estrin has the closest dialogue. In one pen-made sheet of 2011, he even plays an imitation (sorry for another cinematic quote) of the velvety touches of Pyranesian etchings, hazy in timbre. Piranesi in architectural graphics, perhaps, was the first to make us believe to the end that the idea (invention) of a grandiose construction is sometimes more valuable than the embodiment, and the play of imagination (capriccio) is itself the goal of art, without the means that justify it and justified by it. His little understood, but highly appreciated by his contemporaries, the drawn and engraved world in a completely peremptory, imperious and mighty way legitimized the right of architecture to live according to the laws of all types of arts at once. Not only architecture itself, but also music, poetry, acting, film editing (it is not without reason that Eisenstein wrote about Piranesi). A world in which the cyclopean constructions of unknown, plunging buildings into awe and awe are both the scene of action and the artists of the phantasmagoric performance staged by it (architecture).
Just like Piranesi in the novel by Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, Estrin builds a bridge through the centuries and from the 18th century establishes direct contact with the visionary of the avant-garde era, Yakov Chernikhov, with his graphic capriccios. In his compositions, Chernikhov explored the possibilities of being sensitive to the inventions of a new, avant-garde form-creation. Without fear of being branded as an eclectic, Chernikhov pushed fragments and forms of traditional architecture into constructivist, industrial spaces, and built the themes of baroque palaces into endless conveyors that gave rise to the forms of multi-storey skyscrapers. Sergey Estrin has sheets with the names "Chernikhov No. 35", "Chernikhov No. 38". In them, he makes light sketches of the most avant-garde guru in volume. Outputs views, projections and plans that turn the sketch into a detailed project. Such postmodern somersaults with an amplitude from Piranesi to Chernikhov involve many in the orbit of formal metamorphosis. Especially dizzying scherzo Estrina on the theme of architectural organic matter and fantastic cities of the future. Here the interlocutors are Georgy Krutikov with his concept of a "flying city", and Anton Lavinsky with a city on springs, and El Lissitzky with horizontal skyscrapers, and Alexander Labas with his architectural ufology and aliens.
Sergey Estrin's graphics are very musical. In this regard, he continues the tradition of architectural capriccios of one of the founders of paper architecture in the USSR, who lived as Mozart - 35 years old - Vyacheslav Petrenko (1947 - 1982). The works of Vyacheslav Petrenko are presented at an exhibition at the Pushkin Museum. It definitely makes sense to look at them in order to understand what the founder of architectural inventions on paper Petrenko and the heir Estrin have in common, and where they differ significantly. They are similar in that the architecture in their graphics is similar to the notation of the open scores of Mozart: light, virtuoso, sophisticated, dancing. The differences lie in conceptual platforms.
Vyacheslav Petrenko in his graphics (first of all - the megaproject of the Sailing Center in Tallinn) affirmed the philosophical idea of a space-universe, which would clearly embody various themes of "stringing an architectural volume onto the lines of force of the world" (the wording in one of the master's notebooks). Like many wallets of the eighties generation, Petrenko accompanied each sheet with detailed explications, in which he defined the displayed architectural space by referring to various philosophical, social, and artistic associations. The ideal constants of human existence were for him the main theme and the highest meaning.
Sergey Estrin does not accompany his graphics with verbal comments. Its installation presupposes not the search for the only correct solution, but infinite variability, the ability to solve mutually exclusive spatial-plastic problems. It is very modern. It fits into our frantic multimedia, non-Cartesian world, in which versatility has been replaced by polyvariety and discreteness. His graphic work with sometimes neurasthenic, capricious and wayward architecture resembles art house cinema of recent years. Symptoms are presented, and let the viewer make the conclusion.
