Elia Belyutin, a student of Aristarchus Lentulov and Pavel Kuznetsov, developed a methodology for unlocking an individual's creative potential. The alumni of his studio are united not by style but by their shared happiness. Unconstrained art helped them connect with their inner selves. This past fall, Alexey Kuklin engaged in this process in the village of Kideksha, just a few kilometers from Suzdal – the art residence of the MIRA center – seeking his identity through intergenerational connections. He wove the threads of his own personality.
The windows of the artists' austere cottage overlook the Church of Boris and Gleb – a 12th-century monument built at the behest of Yuri Dolgoruky. The ancient white-stone temple evoked an unexpected parallel: a book of engravings by Katsushika Hokusai titled "36 Views of Fuji," which accumulated a series where Belyutin's free style intersects with Japanese minimalism and sacred pathos. A century before Belyutin, Hokusai's series on views of Fuji revolutionized Japanese art by reinterpreting landscape as a method, imbuing it with conventions, symbolism, and color dialectics. In the still stones and restless waves lies abundant drama, as Hokusai vividly demonstrated. Alexey Kuklin was engaged in a similar pursuit.
– Something monumental, powerful, natural, almost zoomorphic, like in Hokusai's engravings, drove me – the author shares. – My paintings lack narrative; I invented forms from geometric shapes, attempted to enhance them with color, combine the incompatible, and break the dimensions of perception. An ornament emerged, where layers seem to peek out from beneath one another.
Knots resembling infinity symbols naturally formed. There are 11 out of 15 created for the exhibition. Ornaments in various color combinations attract with their intricate loops, where numerous parallel universes exist. The paintings of Elia Belyutin displayed alongside also contain knots: made from abstract shapes, they convey a sense of natural power. Take, for instance, a painting constructed from three colors – blue, pink, and black. Before us is a figure, its arms and legs outlined with a single bold stroke, resembling links in a chain, while the forehead evokes a mountain relief. Or another scene – a head tilted back, either screaming or greedily gasping for air, seemingly about to leap from a ring of clasped hands. Kuklin's knots resemble not people but molecules or atoms. Yet, they are interconnected while simultaneously breaking free from within.
Ornaments form structures of the "theory of interaction" – a scientific method of social cognition, where a person understands others by focusing on bodily behavior and surrounding contexts rather than on mental processes. This theory, like Belyutin's "New Reality," was born at the dawn of the "thaw," endured criticism in the 1980s and 1990s, and has recently reached a new level. The exploration of the "I" of a person in contact with other ecosystems, cosmic processes, and societies is more relevant now than ever.
The "Marine Knot" exhibition is a countercultural coincidence: when one, despite being an opposition to the other, simultaneously creates a new isophrase with it. It’s like a traffic light intertwined with pedestrian markings at an intersection. Belyutin exists separately from Kuklin as an artistic phrase, but the connection between these figures forms a knot that opens an important debate about the eternal search for a new quality of color as a bend in sculptural form,” explains the project curator Andrey Bartenyev, who conceptualized the juxtaposition of two artists from different eras in an exhibition at a gallery resembling a fairytale hut.
Andrey Bartenyev describes his student's style as geometric pop art. However, it’s not particularly important how one labels the magnetic loops of Alexey Kuklin. What matters is that they reflect the genetic memory of a culture of liberation, urging every viewer to transcend their own boundaries.