Too few letters and those too many
KIRILL LEBEDEV (KTO)
November 19 – February 26 2021
November 19 – February 26 2021
Triangle gallery is pleased to announce Too few letters and those too many, a new exhibition of paintings by Kirill Lebedev (Kto) (b. 1984, lives and works in Moscow).
For the artist this exhibition is an attempt to go beyond the established reputation, the signature style.
Kirill Lebedev (Kto), one of the pioneers of Russian street art, began by making "silent streets" speak in plain language. Instead of intricate unreadable tags, which even the most graffiti-loving passerby perceives as pretty signs of an unfamiliar and, in general, not too interesting "wild" urban life, like traces of exotic animals and birds in freshly falling snow, the passerby suddenly discovered words that seemed to call out directly to him, which could not be ignored, such as the question "Why?", which had appeared all over Moscow in the early 2000s. The urban space ceased to be impersonal and passive, and, it seemed, was striving with all its might to catch the eye of an absent-minded passerby. One of the most notable projects in Moscow by Kirill Lebedev (Kto) are the eyes that he has been carving in vinyl banners since 2010 - the eyes with which a passerby can look behind the false facade of the city, but also the eyes of the city seeking visual contact with its inhabitants.
Later on, the texts became more and more complex and exuberant - to delve into them, one had to stop and carefully read what was written on the street fence or the canvas on the wall of the gallery. Kirill Lebedev (Kto) practised street art as a form of visual poetry. Unlike "Truisms" and "Inflammatory Essays" by the American artist Jenny Holzer, whose synthesis of street art and conceptualism is reinterpreted by Kirill Lebedev (Kto), his own inscriptions are not conclusive statements, but an active message that calls for an answer. Without waiting for their companion, these texts begin to speak to themselves, plunging into an endless inner dialogue, producing the very "many lettArs" that the artist decided to abandon in his new project.
In his own words, Kirill Lebedev (Kto) has been considering abandoning the text since 2015, and in exhibition spaces, he has long felt no less confident than on the streets. But his new project, which conceptualises the relationship between letters and drawings, came into being in the year of the pandemic, which forced us to rethink the city's space as a space of interaction and communication. The spring of 2020 was remembered for the terrifying and mesmerising images of deserted metropolises and the ironic and utopian memes of how "nature has been purified". The new works of the artist seem to be this pure "nature" of the visual, striving with all its might to "cleanse" from words - because there is no one else to address this speech to in the desolate world. Billboards, ads and graffiti on deserted streets seemed to resemble a similar image of the post-apocalypse even before the pandemic. Although, speech doesn't want to simply keep quiet. The texts on the canvases by Kirill Lebedev (Kto) have been discussing the appropriateness of his presence for some time, but in the end, like the computer in the 'Space Odyssey', the speech is replaced by the 'babbling' of pure visuality. "At first glance, these drawings may seem deliberately infantile - butterflies, herringbones, hedgehogs (images found in the works of Lebedev before). However, at some point, these hieroglyphic images themselves give way to pure abstraction. The artist himself compares his work with abstract expressionism. If desired, one can find references to everything that in the modernist painting of the twentieth century was responsible for - the expression of the unnamed and ineffable - from Hilma af Klint to Agnes Martin. But the images that have been present in the art of Kirill Lebedev (Kto) for more or less a long time are the buttons that turn into four-eyed skulls and the similarities with conventional masks. And these very four eyes, like the eyes, once cut in vinyl banners in Moscow streets, continue to look for a returning gaze.
Irina Kulik
For the artist this exhibition is an attempt to go beyond the established reputation, the signature style.
Kirill Lebedev (Kto), one of the pioneers of Russian street art, began by making "silent streets" speak in plain language. Instead of intricate unreadable tags, which even the most graffiti-loving passerby perceives as pretty signs of an unfamiliar and, in general, not too interesting "wild" urban life, like traces of exotic animals and birds in freshly falling snow, the passerby suddenly discovered words that seemed to call out directly to him, which could not be ignored, such as the question "Why?", which had appeared all over Moscow in the early 2000s. The urban space ceased to be impersonal and passive, and, it seemed, was striving with all its might to catch the eye of an absent-minded passerby. One of the most notable projects in Moscow by Kirill Lebedev (Kto) are the eyes that he has been carving in vinyl banners since 2010 - the eyes with which a passerby can look behind the false facade of the city, but also the eyes of the city seeking visual contact with its inhabitants.
Later on, the texts became more and more complex and exuberant - to delve into them, one had to stop and carefully read what was written on the street fence or the canvas on the wall of the gallery. Kirill Lebedev (Kto) practised street art as a form of visual poetry. Unlike "Truisms" and "Inflammatory Essays" by the American artist Jenny Holzer, whose synthesis of street art and conceptualism is reinterpreted by Kirill Lebedev (Kto), his own inscriptions are not conclusive statements, but an active message that calls for an answer. Without waiting for their companion, these texts begin to speak to themselves, plunging into an endless inner dialogue, producing the very "many lettArs" that the artist decided to abandon in his new project.
In his own words, Kirill Lebedev (Kto) has been considering abandoning the text since 2015, and in exhibition spaces, he has long felt no less confident than on the streets. But his new project, which conceptualises the relationship between letters and drawings, came into being in the year of the pandemic, which forced us to rethink the city's space as a space of interaction and communication. The spring of 2020 was remembered for the terrifying and mesmerising images of deserted metropolises and the ironic and utopian memes of how "nature has been purified". The new works of the artist seem to be this pure "nature" of the visual, striving with all its might to "cleanse" from words - because there is no one else to address this speech to in the desolate world. Billboards, ads and graffiti on deserted streets seemed to resemble a similar image of the post-apocalypse even before the pandemic. Although, speech doesn't want to simply keep quiet. The texts on the canvases by Kirill Lebedev (Kto) have been discussing the appropriateness of his presence for some time, but in the end, like the computer in the 'Space Odyssey', the speech is replaced by the 'babbling' of pure visuality. "At first glance, these drawings may seem deliberately infantile - butterflies, herringbones, hedgehogs (images found in the works of Lebedev before). However, at some point, these hieroglyphic images themselves give way to pure abstraction. The artist himself compares his work with abstract expressionism. If desired, one can find references to everything that in the modernist painting of the twentieth century was responsible for - the expression of the unnamed and ineffable - from Hilma af Klint to Agnes Martin. But the images that have been present in the art of Kirill Lebedev (Kto) for more or less a long time are the buttons that turn into four-eyed skulls and the similarities with conventional masks. And these very four eyes, like the eyes, once cut in vinyl banners in Moscow streets, continue to look for a returning gaze.
Irina Kulik