Warm house in cold land. Alexey Sakhnov:
photos, objects, graphics Automatic translate

Alexey Sakhnov lives in a neuropsychiatric boarding school. What Alexei sees every day of his life, he photographs, draws with colored pencils and a fountain pen. He also builds paper houses: four walls, a door, a window, a gable roof with a chimney. Alexey always sticks the pipe with special care, because the House must be warm.

The Platonic idea of ​​the House varies in different colors and sizes. Sakhnov’s houses always stand on cardboard “ground”, sometimes grouping themselves in villages, sheltered from all sorts of disasters by transparent polyethylene on the frame. The process of their construction is not hidden: magazine texts appear under an uneven layer of paint, layers of paper tape visibly mold the volumes of window and door bindings. An expressive man-made texture may arise involuntarily, but the color schemes of these objects leave no doubt: Alex Sakhnov is a real artist. His small graphic pages also call to admire and reflect, although their plots are always simple: empty spaces, perspectives of corridors, facades with rows of windows, a lone bus on the road. Or a homeless courtyard, where in the corner there is a small bright house with a gable roof…

Art historians have long come up with a name for the spontaneous and independent work of "special" people - Art Brut, or the art of outsiders. “Brut” - in French, “raw”, “raw”. In Russian it is better to say - “unkempt” art, born without regard to fashion and thoughts about fame. Nevertheless, it is worth looking at the works of Alexei Sakhnov with an unprotected eye, without the lornet of art history terms. There are simply people who are not included in our world. We know little about their lives and rarely seek to learn. Their identical beds are close, they do not choose the color of the walls and curtains, do not have privacy and easel. They can help us see the true beauty and value that in our world is often obscured by fakes.