‘Nothing is true’
Arotin & Serghei
‘Flying Cells’ @Tausend — Opening 11.12.13, Schiffbauerdamm 11, 10117 Berlin Mitte
The Whiteloft is a large L-shaped apartment of white walls and furniture. Glass, the artists’ projects, and different frames are propped on the walls. A white leather sofa is set in front of the vast window, from which the shining lights of the Fernseher Turm are just slightly visible through the fog. In minimalist and elegant taste, both Serghei and Arotin fit in well as they greet us and offer something to drink, while lighting thin menthol cigarettes.
From Berlin to Barcelona, through Maastricht and Venice, Arotin&Serghei have worked and lived in most of Europe. They seem to be eternally wandering men. This wanderlust is obvious in their surroundings, the limited amount of things and clutter is obviously a symptom of their ‘pick-up-and-go’ attitude. They speak in quick succession, a run-on-lines between two people, accumulating information in a short space of time and wandering from one topic to the next, one perspective to the other. Between the two of them they seem to tell one story composed of different fragments, opinions and even contradictions. Sometimes Arotin looks towards Serghei as he finishes his point and Serghei will pick up from the middle of his sentence to continue.
This constant flow and exchange of information is epitomized in their work, clear and unified statements of this constant conversation, which are proudly hung on the wall in front of us. All four are large rectangular canvasses, but their similarity ends there. Both in colour, material, shapes and perspective, the two series presented seem to be directly opposed to one another. Colorful, intense, created with layers of plastic laminas, and augmenting the size of one single pixel, their ‘Intermedial Paintings’ stand in contrast to the clean lines of black ink on porous paper, hung in between them, from their ‘Backlight’ series. The full collections have dispersed, to the point that their canvasses are dotted across Europe, with friends and galleries.
Arotin & Serghei’s work seems to stand in opposition with itself, like the two artists. Strictly unfaithful to one single style and eternally engaging in new ways of creating so-called ‘art’, their work is, above all, a study of perspective. From sound pictures, to the conversion of the micro into macro-, in their series on how a pixel expresses colour they analyse how aesthetic perception is constructed. “Nothing is true”, repeats Serghei, as Arotin explains. Eventually, each series creates a specific style and symbolism, which they will re-question and discard in the next.
Holding the thin menthol cigarette between his lips and squinting behind the smoke, Serghei’s movement’s echo his quick words. He points to ‘White Point’ and ‘Golden Point’, the series based on pixels representing white and gold, which are deconstructed and magnified on a canvas to the point that they lose their shape. “These magnified pixels aren’t useful, they don’t and wouldn’t ‘work’ in a screen anymore. What does it mean when we take it and frame it, at such a size that they don’t even express the colour we use it to express in screens? It’s art?” He asks pensively, to himself or Arotin, or both.
This capacity for reinvention and flexibility is their defining characteristic, as seen both in Serghei’s will to reconstruct his life and work in every new place he has lived in, from Vienna to Barcelona to Berlin, to Arotin’s concept of freedom as ‘being free of strategic thinking’. It is only in similar terms that their work can be defined, as an un-constrained indulgence in their own curiosity, unlimited by any previous concept of ‘art’ or ‘beauty’. It is maybe with a little irony that their next installation is permanent. Located in the club ‘Tausend’, opening on the 11th of December, it is but a small cornerstone in the unceasing conversation between the two artists, and can give us a glimpse of one, single, representation of their complex and ever changing thoughts.
