Alexander Pilin

Alexander Pilin is an artist, who works with felt. This material is associated with old traditions, native roots and tactile experiences. It reminds us primigenial and saving feeling of warmth almost in Beuys’s “inner Mongolian” sense. Vitaly Patsukov wrote: “Alexander Pilin’s felt objects contain the secret of primordial happiness. In this artistic system of values felt comes across as the highest state of ‘purified’ matter created and designated in the process of ‘transmutation’ of the organic civilization. At the same time his simplicity, naturalness and spirituality still hope for the recovery of the magic functions of art and revitalize the forgotten meanings of the traditional material”.

But despite all these traditionalist associations and historical philosophism about “deep substance structure of felt” (V. Patsukov), Pilin boldly tailors mythological body of felt, shaping it into paradoxically clear forms of social, historical, and ecological metaphors, with sharp features of grotesque and anecdote. Pilin’s felt art is a kind of philosophizing folklore with the power enclosed in tense dissonance between the theme and the material. Izhevsk artist’s idea of conversion is solved, for example, in the form of felt guns “by Pilin’s system”, that shoot with felt boots.

Felt rake that are soft to step on and the warmest shovel in the world, which Pilin created twenty years after the end of the Soviet civilization, turn gloomy theme of “communist ditch” and depressing reality into an artifact, a fluffy conceptual toy which is not anymore terrible, but still full of multiple meanings.

Alexander Pilin is a contemporary artist who overcame the limits of decorative and applied arts by making his artistic gestures distinct and original, enriching them with certain themes, conditionality and rootedness.