Alexander Koryashkin
Prologue

At first the scene seems perfectly normal.

Ostriches peacefully blend with the landscape. In a while, strange-looking bunnies appear next to them. This is surely a glitch, but still tolerable. A raccoon pops into the ear anatomy chart. Perhaps it is high time to stop and call it all a joke.

But the joke would not end. The scene fails to unfold according to a joke’s narrative structure: it has neither climax nor resolution. It simply goes on and on, as if reality itself lost its sense of appropriateness. A boomerang-wielding aborigine finds himself next to a kangaroo drawing. Body parts aimlessly float around. For no obvious reason, the Queen knights a tree.

Eventually one realises: the show has begun already. The characters are onstage, the scenes segue into one another, but nothing happens. The action seems suspended in midair.

And then enters death. A pelican lies spread out on the shore – too grave, too real. It is joined by a comical cartoon character, as if the image shuddered under its own gloominess, trying to shake it off. Even this incident is not decisive: increasingly ambivalent, it fails to provide a finale.

Alexander Koryashkin is an academically trained artist – a background rooted in convincing and coherent imagery, further reinforced by the artist’s continued presence in the academic circuit since the beginning of his teaching career in 2015. This makes the effortless distortion of logic in his works all the more captivating.

The majority of paintings featured in the exhibition were created within a confined domestic space during the pandemic. Rather than a major creative manifesto, these canvases represent the artist’s attempt to stay active and take his mind off the inhibiting sense of pointlessness and fear.

Here, the effect of absurdity is achieved through a succession of strange captions in which humour is invariably tinged with alarm. Instead of falling apart, the world continues to exist as if nothing happened – only the normal connections within it no longer work. The image still looks convincing, but ceases to explain anything.

So this is the ‘prologue’ – not an introduction to something that must happen later on, but a state in which there might be no ‘later on’ altogether. We are in the habit of thinking that, if something starts, it will surely lead somewhere. But perhaps this is only a habit.