Essay

Fresh Kills
Solo Exhibition
May – August 31st, 2005



The Captured Time in Alexis Rockman's Paradise

"Love will never run low even if you trace
it down with scientific accuracy
to the bottom level of the human cell." - C.G. Jung

Visual culture is constantly creating new mythology as it peers into the future taking it for a utopia. Its transformations shock us far more profoundly than the rapid evolution of the surrounding world and our own physiology. The present human habitat has long been modified by the gene engineering, enveloped in artificial communications, permeated by pop culture, and locked up in the noosphere. In fact its genuine image is more exotic than the banal false image that appears to the eye. Few people are able to reject the dubious vision and give up the virtual spectacles of the Magic Land of OZ. Alexis Rockman is probably the first of these few, a hero of the latest New York school, the naÕve youngster from Andersen's fairytale, who speaks up each time he sees "the Emperor's new clothes".

Directly perceived reality, after it has undergone all its mutations beginning with the Universe's "great explosion", has become Rockman's main theme. This artist prodigy spent his childhood in the Natural History Museum in New York, where Holden, the young hero of his favorite writer Salinger, met his sister and recalled the song about "the catcher in the rye". Alexis's mother, a curator at this museum, often took her son on her archaeological expeditions, in which he was immersed in the living layers of lost times much like Cezanne was in the geological spaces of the ancient Provence. Later Rockman took up molecular biology and genetics, which enabled him to experience visually the planet's history and the photosynthesis of its life through its continuities and catastrophes. The accumulated knowledge, multiplied by his passion for the cinema with its multimedia forms and possibilities, helped him to discover a gift for visionary art in himself and made him a prophet of futuristic civilizations, a double of Michel Houellebecq in visual phenomena.

Formally, his art is close to classical surrealism. Therefore it is not accidental that his major program work bears the same title as Joan Miro's famous "The Farm", and it also assumes the role of a manifesto. There is one difference though: what is a dream in the work of the pioneer of surrealism, in Rockman becomes a metaphor for the planetary evolution localized in this farm as a living evidence of modern technology advancing on the mundane agricultural strategies. In his "Chronicles" the artist organically combines the two opposites: the lofty triumphs of our civilization and the ironic images of mass consciousness. He is a strong contender not only for the pioneers of surrealism, who translate dreams into reality, but also with such stars of the modern art scene as the British Damian Hurst and his fellow countryman Mathew Barney.

Without a doubt, the picture of the modern-day world painted by Alexis Rockman supplements and renders more precise the model of the world proposed by Marcel Duchamp in his famous "Large Glass", a "bachelors' car" showing "a bride stripped naked by her bachelors". All that is ideal, existing in the realm of the unconscious, in people's dreams, in erotic mythology, is now placed in the material world. Symbolic cultural activity moves into a paradoxical phase, which is perhaps its concluding phase, although the humankind may not yet be aware of the fact - fantasies and desires move inexorably into the realm of reality, turning our world into a "wonderland". It flares up and shimmers as an oceanic surface concealing its huge depths but appearing as a water pool, it becomes an artificial biosphere, an exotic computer forest, a simulacrum of a primeval world. In these spaces there is no longer a place for a King Kong but there is still a possibility of unity among dolphins, pigs, squirrels, and giant infusoria. They create a world of ideal harmony in the newly recovered paradise reminiscent of Noah's Arc.

The genius of Eisenstein defined art as "a montage of shows". Alexis Rockman translated into life the dream of the great inventor of illusions by creating a hyper-show whose dimensions are lost in the blurred outlines of the distant past, disappearing beyond the endless horizons of the future and finally shedding any contexts of the times. Time becomes irrelevant in this cosmic laboratory with its layers of this man-made biosphere and starry nebula floating by, where not only laboratory dogs are traditionally tested, all those "Belkas and Strelkas', but also cows as natural milk-producing machines.

Life goes on in seemingly impossible living conditions. By overcoming "cultural ambivalence" the artist creates a new nature. In its niches and relieves technologies are inseparable from the original creations and their clones, artifacts blend with the natural environment, in this new democratic space populated with stars, plants, animals and human smiles.

Embodying his meditations in his windows-screens Alexis Rockman positions himself as a witness of new history, or rather post-history now; he makes use of the wreckage from the disappearing civilization, thus preserving them in his three-dimensional "dioramas". This wreckage is de-mythogized to become mere material for the artist's visual cosmogony and thus becoming a "cabinet of curiosities". Rockman does not shy from working as a restorer and a stalker, he works with refuse and all sorts of the dying relics of the past, he cleanses the techno-sphere from slugs in the name of a new "philosophical stone", that is, a meta-reality with its poetics of the perpetual circulation and images of eternal paradise. The artist is thus transformed into a veritable bio-engineer while at the same time his technique includes magic over paints, incantations for emulsions, and breathing spirit into pigment substances. He combines in his technique hand-made magic with impersonal material evidence, adding layer after layer and turning his paintings into mysterious receptacles of "new materiality", such as the boxes of Marcel Duchamp and D. Cornell. Rockman's creations increasingly resemble our planet as seen from outer space - transparent and mysterious, with blue oceans and green continents, surrounded by the intellectual spaces of the noosphere.

In this role of a traveler through outer spaces, like the hero of Malevich's opera "Victory over the Sun", Alexis Rockman wins back the achievements of art from our civilization; he displaces his finds in the strange mirrors of quotations by crossing the direct yet fantastic reality with his artistic discoveries. Then his own art comes to resemble a majestic blockbuster, a battlefield for his ideals, where one glimpses the mysterious natural kingdoms with their unvanquished spaces directly linked with computer screens and the radical world of new games and technologies. His art overcomes the shock of his own unexpected twists of plot; it conceals and thus preserves the yet unexpressed meanings, which have been engaged by the future, pregnant as they are with creative gestures.

The art of Alexis Rockman is suspended within the bounds of the insane yet wonderful present, within its esthetic ecology, as a phenomenon of protective symbols, in the image of a dolphin as a great encoded sacral message. His art models a new human being by resurrecting his historical memory and recreating his lost ties with the body of our common home the planet earth.

By Vitaly Patsukov

Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Inc.
Iljinka Street 3/8 bld. 5
Moscow, Russia 109012
Tel: (+7 095) 101-21-02 Fax: (+7 095) 101-21-04

e-mail: info@tatintsian.com