Ac­cord­ing to his words, he turned to the art of pho­tog­ra­phy after hav­ing ac­ci­den­tally seen photo works by Andy Warhol. Search­ing for his own way Svesh­nikov soon started tak­ing lessons from Oleg Bakharev, one of the lead­ing Leningrad pho­tog­ra­phers in the 1970’s. He was also deeply in­flu­enced by his friend Boris Smelov who in­tro­duced him to the art of Henri Cartier-Bres­son, Diane Arbus, Bill Brandt, Josef Sudek and other mas­ters of pho­tog­ra­phy.

In his work Svesh­nikov ex­per­i­mented ex­ten­sively with old print­ing tech­niques, using dif­fer­ent styles and gen­res. He used to say:

“There's so much be­hind the word “pho­tog­ra­phy”. To me it’s some­thing from graph­ics. So here’s etch­ing and here’s pho­tog­ra­phy… Cam­era is just like etch­ing press. You can make a good pho­to­graph any­where. Even right here, right now”.

This ex­hi­bi­tion in­cludes twenty works from the se­ries En­tropy that was pre­sented at the gallery of Jam Hall Cin­ema (Saint Pe­ters­burg) in 2005.

Work­ing on his pro­ject, Svesh­nikov doc­u­mented ob­jects in a state of decay doomed to obliv­ion and de­struc­tion.

“Cul­tured plants and an­i­mals can­not com­pete with free preda­tors. Things turn into dust and rust. Ideas are for­got­ten or, even worse, warped in such a way that they are not rec­og­niz­able any more. Man’s cre­ations are not ca­pa­ble of self-de­vel­op­ment. They are sub­jects to decay. Sooner or later it hap­pens. De­com­po­si­tion at a city dump is pain­less and quick. In a mu­seum or hen­house it is tragi­comic… We can give a sec­ond life to the lumps of our great de­cay­ing su­per­mar­ket. A life in art”.

Artist painted prints from black-and-white films with pen­cils and mark­ers.

En­tropy as a mea­sure of “dis­or­der” in the pro­ject of Sergei Sveshinkov is an in­ter­est­ing ex­am­i­na­tion of how the tra­di­tional vi­sual lan­guage de­cays into min­i­mal “dis­crete” that has its own con­text depth and be­comes re­flec­tion of re­al­ity in art.

---

Venue: House of Cin­ema, Kar­a­van­naya str., 12