Anton Kushaev on Art: 'Incompleteness Is the Key Element'

Anton Kushaev (Born in Moscow, 1983) based on Cyprus. In paintings ,drawings and objects, Anton focuses on the problems of revising sign systems from art history, the circulation of analogue images in the digital era, as well as experiments in demythologizing the “spiritual” in art and culture. Graduated from the Moscow Art School of Applied Arts and the Icon Painting School at the Moscow Theological Academy, and studied at the Baza Institute (Moscow).

Solo exhibitions were held in Voskhod gallery (Basel), Artwin gallery (Moscow), Szena gallery (Moscow), Triumph gallery (Moscow) and CCA Winzavod (Moscow).

Participant of triennial of contemporary art , museum “GARAGE” (Moscow).

Ekaterina Shcherbakova (born in Novorossiysk, 1990) lives and works in Paris. She is an artist, curator, writer and teacher, whose practice engages the potential of the invisible. Her work is process-based and anchored in preverbal states of mind. Taking a deep dive into autofiction, she explores such themes as the female experience, motherhood, sacred, magic, and language performativity.
Ekaterina is the alumni of Ecole du Magasin (Grenoble, France) and the art department of Paris 8 University. She has collaborated with such institutions as Typography Art Center, Center for Contemporary Art NPAK, Parc Saint-Léger, Le CAP Saint-Fons, Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Venice Biennale, etc.

Ekaterina: Let's start with the epigraph for the exhibition. You decided to forgo any explanatory text but took a quote from the Psalms. Could you tell us where this quote came from? Are there images or thoughts connected to it that you could share?

Anton: Once, I had a similar experience when I organized a small exhibition in Moscow, also in an artist-run space, and it was a similar format. I was deeply fascinated by Russian Symbolism at that time, the poetry of the Symbolists, and so on. I took a poem by Bryusov and deconstructed it—mixing up lines, doubling them, and so on. Before that, I did something similar with a poem by Andrei Beliy in the brochure for the exhibition Pustotsvet. The goal was to expose Russian pseudo-spirituality, a certain ambition, but to do this in a way that was subtle and not too direct. I wanted to transform the words and the text in a way that would create a crack within the perception of poetry. For me, and still to this day, this is a major issue—the over-textualization, something already expressed, formulated, or spoken aloud. I see this as an irrevocable failure of the text itself and the very idea of expressing the inexpressible or speaking about things that might be better left unsaid. So, I was trying to figure out the format in which I could work with the space at Rally. I began looking for a way to replace the "explanatory text" with poetry or some poetic lines. In general, this textual violence of contemporary art—or what we might call "contemporary art"—really annoys me. So, I wanted to return to a pre-verbal or non-verbal state, or at least not rely on the crutch of reasoning like "the curator explained." I realized that the Psalms, as a familiar and recognizable poetic reference, would fit best. After all, my experience of reading the Psalms and being a reader in church was still very important to me.

E: You participated in services as a reader?

A: Yes, I was even tonsured at the end of my studies at the icon-painting school, which means that for about four years I was constantly a reader in a temple, taking part in the liturgy. I just recently thought about how I still remember many of the Psalms and parts of the service by heart. I thought it would be great to use them in this work, in the exhibition at Rally Space. I didn’t want to deconstruct the text of the Psalm like I did with the Symbolist poetry. Here, I wanted to find some precise and meaningful poetic space. I had a sense of ruin, the exhibition is even called Ultra Ruin. These lines could more fully reflect the theme of the body as a ruin, as disappearance, as being absorbed by space.

E: I now understand that this isn't really about text—it’s more about voice. It's about listening to something. There’s a sculptural element here as well, an escape from over-textualization and rigidity, and so this becomes both a construct and a mural that will eventually be painted over, and then it will disappear. The text here is both a remnant and a potential for activation—meaning that you or some other voice could give it existence in the space, sing or say it.

A: You could even go further and say that the text itself is the ruin of the voice. The text ruins the voice and destroys it. What we might express voicelessly—this is completely lost in the sense of words as a set of abstract concepts, signs, commas, and periods. Perhaps it's important to clarify that, as in past works, I decided to write the text by hand because there is something more personal about it, a more emotionally charged message. And the act of writing by hand is something physical.

E: Why Ultra? I know there was another title initially, right?

A: I was thinking of calling it Bitter Ruin, but at some point, honestly, I thought, "Here we go again—you're starting to whine, there's some sadness, some melancholy, such a bore."

E: Ultra sounds like something very cool, something fast, something effective. It feels like a capitalist construction of success—ultra-light, ultra-sweet, that kind of thing.

A: No, for me, it's more about radicalization. It's the ruin in its radical state. It’s something that has reached the extreme. It’s the ruination of that ruin. And this is one of the important tools—pushing it to the absurd. You work with the material, and you twist the knob so much that it goes to another level. The claims to the work itself fade, the multiple connotations with capitalist meanings, by the way, fade, and suddenly something else is revealed, where logic doesn’t work the way it usually does outside of absurdity. In this sense, the title embraces self-absurdization and radicalization.

E: Let’s talk about the sculptures. I know that over the last year, you've been very actively working on painting—your output seems almost incredible. We've discussed the conflict between flat and volume, and you’ve told me repeatedly that you’re interested in capturing everything in the canvas and putting everything into it. But the new sculptures can take on different forms because they’re a kind of constructor, and you could assemble them in various ways. How did the idea to make sculptures come to you?

A: I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of paper architecture. You can depict an object that doesn’t exist and may never exist, but in its imagined form, it works as an object. The idea of depicting an object or a sculpture has always been important to me. I’ve kept this idea internally for a long time. Someone once told me I should try making sculptures from what I draw. But for me, what’s important is the method of not making a sculpture, but rather depicting it or imagining it through that depiction. It’s the interaction between imagination and representation. Can we depict something? This question comes from iconology. Can we depict something that we imagine, and how legitimate is the claim to truth through that depiction? At some point, I realized I wanted to work with abstraction. And not just as a collection of figurative elements, like I did for a period when I was depicting architectural elements or deconstruction itself, trying to make an icon of the imagined, an iconographic thing. Now I have the goal of trying to reduce the painting. But how to do it, honestly, I still don’t know. It’s very hard to work with a reduction in abstraction in such a way that nothing at all disappears from the image, and I wanted to expel the elements of representation from the painting. In this sense, working with frescoes and sculptures in this exhibition is about this process of expulsion. The painting has dissolved and turned into space, into architecture. And the murals themselves depict the walls they’re painted on—they’ve opened up and showed us what’s beyond the canvas. We look into the painting’s glow that’s simmering somewhere behind the surface of the canvas. For me, the important part of working with murals was not the image of the walls, but the space behind them. Relying on material helps maintain a sense of reality. I found stones in the mountains that resembled red ochre. They had probably been sun-baked, and a crust of red pigment had formed. I ground them into powder and used that pigment for the murals. Working with material is always a reliance on something concrete. Similarly, working with local clay is a reliance on something real, something specific taken from reality and placed into the space of art. I’m scared by the abstractness inherent in painting, and how to approach it, I still don’t know. I’m always amazed by the courage and boldness of artists who dive into abstraction because, for me, it feels full of terrifying and uncontrollable things. The very act of painting a white canvas with paint is audacious, not to mention the idea that the paint itself is the final truth. Honestly, I’m really glad I even tried it because it feels like riding an elevator you unconsciously fear. You’ve gone through it—you’ve survived, and that’s an achievement.

E: In our conversations, you often talk about how the material, especially clay, tells you what to do with it, and you approach it with respect.

A: I’d like to think that I work through a respectful attitude toward the material, again, through giving voice to that material. Still, it always ends up happening in a colonialist way. You try to decolonize the material, make it flow freely in its self-manifestation, but on the other hand, you still make a move that lets you enjoy the material, and again, it all circles back to your perception. The problem is that this duality of work never goes away, but it’s exactly this that art can show. Because very little in life, in reality, can show you this duality, this rupture. The rupture between what you want and what you actually got, if we simplify it. As soon as you touch it, a whole series of uncomfortable and clarifying questions arise that you can’t answer. I would call this process "trying to work." You try, and see how it behaves, what can come out of it. This is the fundamental, perhaps motivating question for an artist: "What will come of it?" Something came out, and you’ve once again loaded it with your meanings, synchronized it with your traumas and language. Over the year, I read conversations with Alfred Schnittke, and he said a phrase that inspired me. He said, "A composer is someone who constantly ruins ideas." And every time, after ruining them, he thinks, "Well, next time I’ll get closer to the original that I hear in my head." This is the process of fragmentation, of not seeing the whole, and yet the painting’s claim to be whole, visible, unified. These are the things I want to present through the tools that art provides.

E: This exhibition is full of experiments and is, in general, a significant stage for you. From a material point of view, you’re not making paintings, not buying paint, and from the perspective of the breakdown of the painting, when it moves from the mental space into the physical. But if we just go to your website or Instagram, we see the image of the nail in many of your works over the years. Could you tell us where the nail comes from for you and what it means?

A: One of the main questions that concerns not only artists but seems to concern engineers, constructors, scientists, and so on is the question, "How does everything work?" What’s the mechanism embedded in everything? For a long time, alongside the imagined object, the imagined sculpture, and the very sense of sculpturality, I’ve been thinking about how these imagined parts of an object connect. What are these connections? It’s like joints, but how do they actually work? Does the nail somehow play a role in these connections? The very act of connecting something to something else can be quite violent. Images arise around it—like a medieval nail hammered into the head, naturally, the nail that nails the body to the cross, nails used in rituals, etc. In this exhibition, I wanted not only to work with the image of the nail itself—to look at the semantics of this symbol—but to make a mannequin of the nail. These are clay nails, not real ones, fragile, depicting the nail. And this is another twist of rupture between the real, concrete object and its representation. The sculptures themselves also depict tools or mechanisms, but they don’t work. That’s the illustration of art. Art is something no one needs, a useless non-functioning mechanism, in a utilitarian sense. Of course, we can bring up some economic theories on this, but still. These sculptures, as non-functioning mechanisms, and the clay nails, merely depicting an object, leave the plane of the painting, stepping out of the mental dimension into the real. For me, what’s important in art is the element of incompleteness. You can’t figure out what it is. As a human, you don’t put the last period and say, "I understand it, I’ve got it." Art is exactly about the fact that you don’t know anything. It shows you that you don’t understand anything. You walk through exhibitions, look at objects, regardless of the period, and you think, "Yes, I know the contexts, I know the meanings, I’ve figured them out, I’m a genius." But in reality, no, we don’t know how everything works.

E: We’ve come to the last question. Was there a work, practice, or conversation that influenced or inspired you in the process of preparing for the exhibition?

A: For me, the issue of over-textualization remains not only in art but also in everyday life. Over the past couple of years, I’ve found it difficult to read. Before, I used to read quite actively, even a lot. Now, I constantly jump between Proust, Goethe, Sorokin, Umberto Eco, and poetry. I’ve caught myself feeling exhausted by text. Recently, music has given me much more than text. I started listening to a lot of classical music, and I still do. I mentioned the book Conversations with Alfred Schnittke—I read it little by little. I can read one page, and that’s enough because it gives me a palette of thoughts that I can work with. Music opens up another dimension. There is no linguistic violence, no specific language violence there. It has its own language, but it’s more abstract, and it brings hope, and fresh air. Maybe it’s a bit naive to talk about music like this, but that’s how I feel about it.

E: Yes, music leaves a lot of room for abstraction. It’s one of the most abstract art forms. How do you listen to it? Do you listen when you work, or do you walk somewhere with headphones?

A: The best way for me is a long walk. It gives you a specific time for listening. The classic time for a symphony is around forty minutes, and you can walk those forty minutes with the music.

The Ultra Ruin solo exhibition by Anton Kushaev is on display at the Rally Space in Paphos (Athinas 19, Pafos) until November 4th.