25.04.2023

Sergey Sonin / Elena Samorodova

We imagine Secret Russia as a gigantic marching altar with countless niches, vast spaces waiting to be filled, temporarily draped with coronal threads-a sunny cobweb in the measured sway of a silent overture.

Sergey Sonin and Elena Samorodova (Partnership "Lead and Cobalt") are multimedia artists, working in two capitals: Moscow and St. Petersburg, founders of several art associations. Their works are in the collection of the Museum of Moscow, Krasnoyarsk Museum Center "Peace Square", Multimedia Art Museum and in private collections.

MANIFEST

Secret Russia as Opus Magnum

Waiting for a light hand and a passionate eye. And the clock going differently...

Small creators ("sub creators") blow the dust off large forms and events. Centered Figures unleash energy, and shadows of light penetrate the space of Traditions, - as projections of the imaginary and the ineffable.

There is still sometimes the belief that for most of its annual cycle, Russia (both secret and manifest) remains in a state of sleepy stasis. But Russia is always on the move, often unnoticed by the eye. In the sun, when it is in the sun, when it is against the sun. In all the archaic power of its dialects and the technocracy of its aspirations, actions, and gestures. With a constantly multiplying Pantheon of deities and heroes.

The transition of parallel lines into perpendicular ones depends on the shifting of focal points. The impact on the world (what's behind the outline) is always spontaneous, asymmetrical, unpredictable and surprising.

We fill the altar niches with figures. Among them are the terms, the penances, the manns, the laras, the effigies, etc. They are the guardians of the inner landscape. And here they find their material embodiment in the form of sculptures, standards of former campaigns, stove subject tiles (when the stove is more than a stove and is an allegorical constant - a matrix).

Staged photographic series, video murals, musical interpretations, and much more on our interdisciplinary Way, add up to a personal format - a slow kaleidoscope of bizarre optics.

The spatial limits of national-historical myths are contingent; they are constantly pulsating and expanding.

Following the tradition of romantic sacral hyperboles, we sometimes recreate them anew.

The truth of Myth is our subjective reality. Conjugation, on the other hand, gives us the freedom to maneuver. The mental map of expanded consciousness implies a sacred geography. An example of which is the metaphor: "the Hellas of the Spirit under the rule of Eternal Rome. We assert the right of inheritance of traditions that do not seem to belong to us directly. All the meanings we admire, wherever they are found - in Egypt, in India, in 18th century Russia, in the Russian Far North - become the building blocks of Secret Russia, decorating one of its many provinces.

While praising Russia's technical breakthroughs in the past and in the present, we nevertheless feel that our country is agrarian - a country of the Earth. It is for us AgroCosmos. Outside its celestial dome, an eternal parade of planets moves majestically. Beneath the dome extend the vast lands of Northern Arcadia: fields, orchards, and plots with endemic crops cultivated by militia villagers (in the sense of aratoris milites, warrior-swords in the field of the spirit); we see their sturdy dwellings with the "Bruce Calendar", that existential Table of the Times, which defines and explains the very generic predestination.

The Palladian spirit of the classics is not scholastic classicism or stylization for us. It is a Dionysian dance rite, pillars, sheaves, columns in fields of agro-cosmic syncretism, a gallery of sumptuous dendro-sculptures and incredible millefleurs.

The foundations and rules of classical architecture from Palladio's books are transformed by passing through the spaces of the anomalous ring of Central Russia, forming our living architectural Order, our field and forest structure, our domestic genome. Thus emerges a metaphysical fantasy in the genre of documentary myth about the inscrutability of layers of secret Russia.