The Central Institute of Graphic Arts in Rome is on via della Stamperia, ie Typographic Street, next to the Trevi Fountain Square, 3 minutes walk from Corso; directly opposite is the Roman Academy of St. Luke. It is very cozy around, there are many tourists and a pleasant atmosphere of a classic city, built mainly in the 17th and 18th centuries, but on the foundations of the time of Octavian Augustus. It is not surprising that the place for the exhibition of Sergei Tchoban, timed to coincide with the 300th anniversary of Piranesi, was found right here. The exhibition was co-organized by the Institute of Graphics and the Berlin Tchoban Foundation Museum of Drawing.
The protagonist of the exhibition was copies of four Piranesi's prints from the collection of Sergei Tchoban: the Roman landscape depicted at the end of the 18th century was accurately copied and supplemented by a contrasting modern building, quite fantastic. The boards were made according to the sketches of Sergei Tchoban by the architect Ioann Zelenin. It is said that modern volumes were drawn directly into original prints from the collection, and only then transferred to copper boards, from which, in turn, "hybrid" prints for the exhibition were obtained.
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zooming 1/3 Imprint of the future. Architectural fantasy on the theme of Piranesi's etching "Veduta dell'esterno della Gran Basilica di S. Pietro in Vaticano" Engraving by Ioann Zelenin after a drawing by Sergei Tchoban
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zooming 2/3 Imprint of the future. Architectural fantasy on the theme of Piranesi's etching “Veduta della Piazza di Monte Cavallo”. The engraving was made by Ioann Zelenin after a drawing by Sergei Tchoban
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zooming 3/3 Imprint of the future. Architectural fantasy on the theme of Piranesi's etching “Veduta della Piazza Navona sopra le rovine del Circo Agonale” Engraving by Ioann Zelenin after a drawing by Sergei Tchoban
All four landscapes: Piazza Navona, Quirinal, Arch of Septimius Severus in the Forum and St. Peter's Basilica are textbook views from the series of Roman views leading to Piranesi. Glass forms are built into them, in two cases they look like long passages and gigantic consoles, a semblance of the City rises against the background of the Quirinal, but with more complex than usual forms, and a cross between a skyscraper and a viewing console hangs over the arch of Septimius Severus. …
These four images, in which Rome in the 18th century in the engravings of the famous master - a classicist as much as a romantic, one of the most felt, and therefore most famous, Vedutists - meet the supposed forms of the city of the future, let's say, of the 21st century, modernist neo-modernist, at least glassy and almost disregarding gravity, constitute the core of the exhibition, its central hall number two.
The hall is called "Imprint of the Future", because on the Piranesi vedutes showing us the city of the past, antique, baroque, and the city of the 18th century, some new buildings are literally imprinted, printed, they are not yet, but they may appear, everything goes to that - as if the author of these "engraved collages" tells us, forcing the buildings of the time of the Roman emperors and modernist fantasies to meet in the space of the engraved board.
In addition to the "core", there is also the first hall of the exhibition, which shows "simply" city views without fantastic inclusions: modernist cities of the 20th century, classical European cities and Petersburg, the hometown of Sergei Tchoban. The principles of a traditional city are described in the course of the exposition: this is a combination of dominants and background buildings, the arrangement of both vertically, according to the base-middle-top principle, and the top is always thinner; the predominance of the load-bearing wall (windows up to 40%), the materiality of the wall, decor. It also says that the city of the XX century abandons these principles: "the main aspiration of architects was the construction of iconic houses-sculptures that would contrast with their size and shape with the historical environment and, due to this contrast, made radical changes in the fabric of the city."
In this article, Sergei Tchoban commented on his attitude to the "protective" policy of modern St. Petersburg.
In the third, final hall, there are many drawings that develop the theme of coexistence in one illusory space of a historical city and inclusions that are ahead of bold modern fantasies in the calculation of the development of technology, declared in the "corrected" Piranesi engravings. Some of the drawings predate the Piranesi engravings in time, others are their sketches, and others, and this is noticeable, were made specifically for the exhibition. All three halls together represent a graphic statement supplemented with verbal explanations (their author is Anna Martovitskaya, one of the curators of the exhibition).
The compositions can be divided into: recognizable views of the historic city with skyscrapers in the background; fantasy types of historical architecture, sprouting in modern tiers, the higher, the bolder and more "modern", but in compliance with the general logic of the historical city, described in the comments to the exhibition; views of the "phased" city, where layer by layer is replaced by old architecture, skyscrapers of Chicago and the glass city. As if the author of all these drawings examines different types of interaction between the old and the new, tastes them, compares them with historical parallels and his own thoughts - all this through graphics.
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zooming 1/4 Imprint of the future. Architectural fantasy on the theme of Piranesi's etching “Altra veduta del tempio della Sibilla in Tivoli” © Sergey Tchoban
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zooming 2/4 Imprint of the future. Architectural fantasy on the theme of Piranesi's etching "Veduta del Tempio, detto della Tosse" © Sergey Tchoban
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zooming 3/4 Imprint of the future. Architectural fantasy on the theme of Piranesi's etching "Veduta del Tempio di Ercole nella Città di Cora © Sergey Tchoban
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zooming 4/4 Imprint of the future. Architectural fantasy on the theme of Piranesi's etching “Veduta del Porto di Ripetta” © Sergey Tchoban
In some places, in addition to associations with the City districts of different cities, there is a reminder of radical invasions that have already been implemented, for example, next to the Arch of the North at the Forum, a tower sprouts similar to Lord Norman Foster's London Gherkin, which is a textbook example of the contrast between old and new.
And finally, as the apotheosis of all this quest - a city stitched with glass tentacles. Broken lines and volumes removed from historical buildings gradually become "bolder", acquire curved, even curling shapes and repeatedly pass through buildings. Especially bright, and maybe sarcastic, is the drawing of the Colosseum.
In general, it is quite obvious that the theme of contrasting intersection, hypertrophied difference and shocking opposition of modern and historical architecture, moreover, the old and the new city, which has been of interest to Sergei Tchoban for many years, has reached a new conceptual level in the Roman exhibition.
Firstly, the prints of "spoiled" Piranesi engravings themselves are an experience akin to laboratory modeling. The futuristic buildings are placed not only in the context of the historical city in its state more than 200 years ago (the Arch of the North has not been excavated), but also in the material of execution characteristic of the 18th century: copper engraving, print. If it was a render on the screen, where a couple of towers and consoles would be inserted into the panorama of existing Rome, it would be just an LVA, landscape-visual analysis, but on a hypothetical topic. In this case, the objects are placed not in modern Rome, but in old, and even executed in the Piranesi technique. "The imprint of the future" reminds the plots of science fiction literature and cinema, where the heroes fall into the past, and traces of their activities begin to appear in old photographs and in newspapers available in our time - in common parlance, such characters are called "hitmen": they went to the past, what- then they fixed / spoiled it, but most importantly - they lit up. So here, in essence, we are faced with a hoax, as if we are looking at evidence of the operation of a time machine. Only it was exposed in advance, so everything is probably somewhat different: the works relate to time in the same way as the icon, according to Ouspensky's interpretation, to space: in the icon, God looks at us from the beyond world, and here the future looks at the past, trying to be reflected in it, try on, as in front of a mirror.
This kind of work over time echoes the activities of Piranesi himself: he explored ancient Rome, engraved plans for famous buildings (and I must say, in Piranesi's engravings, the city looks more interesting in places than it does now, it has many buildings with petal plans, it is all like lace) … Piranesi restored ancient Rome, from candlesticks to planning structures, to the reconstruction of giant vaulted spaces, that is, he turned the present to the past or translated the past into the present. Sergei Tchoban is experimenting with the future, predicting those vines that are capable of developing from the sprouts we know now. They cut through the ground and penetrate windows, hang with a luminous net over the ruins, explore the spaces inside.
But the main thing is that they are watching. And there, and there is staffage. In the 18th century, this was accepted, however, in the architectural graphics of the 20th century too: the drawing is accompanied by figures that make it possible to understand the scale (this is now being avoided in architectural photographs). As a result, among the ruins, we see pastoral peizans in hats, sitting on the rubble of columns; sometimes some people in cocked hats and frock coats giving orders to servants - a clear echo of the 18th century. And above them, in glass pipes and consoles equipped with lifts and escalators, many observers are moving, and they are even drawn somewhat differently, as a modernist rather than neoclassical staffage; the figures come to the "TV sets" of the consoles, look from there. It looks like a museum, again from the field of pseudo-science fiction, some kind of Reserve of fairy tales, two different worlds intersecting in space, but isolated from each other: tourists look "as it was before", this plot is in many works. Although, to be precise, "tourists" in glass are everywhere, and peizans appear, probably as a result of the development of the author's views from drawing to drawing, and perhaps even as a result of referring to Piranesi.
Here another analogy arises from the field of lyrical fiction. People in pipes are looking at the historic city, but the pipes and consoles themselves are watching, the expression on their faces, perhaps, will be more interesting than that of people - curious snail antennae-eyes, energetic, but generally quite friendly. From the "radioactive" city of Le Corbusier, which replaced everything with its repeating houses, and from the city of Iona Friedman, hovering on thin legs over the old buildings, - preserving it, but with a somewhat indifferent method of "overhanging" - this version of a super-modern city is interesting to the old city. To such an extent that it looks like not a city, but a museum stage in a conserved space. That is, these people live somewhere else, perhaps in the city of Planes Voisin, or on the moon, and they come here to look at the old city. One way or another, glass intrusions, which first appeared in Sergei Tchoban's drawings as a background of discordant towers, later seemed to "want to communicate."
I remember the 1978 cartoon "Contact", directed by Vladimir Tarasov and screenwriter Alexander Kostinsky: there, as we all remember, an alien tried to establish contact with an earthly artist and everything ended quite well.
It is characteristic that in the cartoon "attempts at contact" occur first through observation, photographing, and then through the reincarnation of an alien: he turns into boots, then into an easel, but contact occurs when he becomes like an artist.
Choban's graphics seem to be sorting through the options for contact, and it is clear that attempts of the new architecture to become similar to the old one arise only in one, not the most numerous, series of drawings. Basically, the interaction is based on rather aggressive contrast and at the same time freezes at the first stage - observation (and, probably, photography). Note that the artist, the object of contact in the cartoon, changes positions from fear to indifference; and so, here, in the drawings, the old city is often indifferent. Although you can imagine that he reacts to what is happening with varying degrees of rushiness, which is read as fear.
This is not to say that these observations give much hope for successful contact. The mere fact that people in different spaces are completely isolated (maybe by time?) Does not inspire optimism. But it is probably more important that contact is not completely ruled out, and even more important that there is no doomed didactics and sarcasm, although at times, somewhere on the edge, and they can be felt. But the exhibition is more likely to ask questions and seek answers than to suggest recipes.
“… If we consider a European city as a completely definite system of relations between empty and built-up spaces, low and high building elements, their silhouettes and surfaces, which has been established for centuries, then how should we treat it today? What conditions for the coexistence of the old and the new are we able to provide for it? Among the explications there are words that the calls to recreate a European city in our time are hardly realistic.
Moreover, the drawings are beautiful, and beautiful enough so that, not excluding completely a certain itinerant-critical component, nevertheless, one can argue that the polemics of the poster type “friend or foe”, so characteristic of our contemporaries and compatriots, is not here. Rather, it is a new statement on the topic. It seems to be somewhat different from the message contained in the book "30:70". Among the illustrations of the book, there have already appeared contrasting compositions from the ones shown now. The exhibition, on the one hand, once again emphasizes the contradiction noted there, but on the other hand, supplements it with a new statement - the structural discrepancy between modern and historical architecture. If the book contained a recommendation: in order to get a good city, in addition to completely neutral boxes and bright accents, you need to build something calm and decorated, allowing you to hold your gaze, then the exhibition seems to assert the impossibility of such a compromise. Modern architecture is incapable of following the logic of an old European city. Whether this statement is polemical and calls, so to speak, modern architecture to reconsider its behavior (which is hardly possible, as it is said there among the explications). Either the recommendations were replaced by the posing of questions, what exactly is the meaning of art, if we consider it as one of the methods of analyzing reality.