Valran "Combinatorics" Automatic translate

Valery Valran is a St. Petersburg artist, for the last 20 years he has been creating pictorial and graphic series connected by a single concept, then he presents it to the viewer as an integral project. In the Combinatorics series, Valran returns to still life - the last time he presented Simple Still Life in Moscow at the Sam Brook Gallery in 2005.

In the new project, the artist refused to design a composition of still lifes and left this to the CASE. Still life, as you know, "the image of inanimate objects." Eight objects were selected as inanimate objects, which the author has systematically used in his painting since 1975: 1. Fish. 2. Bottle (vessel). 3. The skull. 4. Bread. 5. A glass. 6. The egg. 7. The sink. 8. The apple. The artist presented the plane of the canvas as a matrix consisting of two columns and 4 rows (vertical series) or 4 columns and 2 rows (horizontal series). Valran filled each cell of the matrix with the above items. 8 different objects make it possible to construct from them 40,320 non-repeating combinations (permutations). A random sequence of objects in each composition was provided by a home lottery drum - 8 tennis balls with numbers were placed in a “black box” and removed sequentially, determining the combination of objects for the next composition. There are 15 of them. Is this set of 15 combinations out of 40,320 possible random?

Since we don’t know what chance is, it is elusive and multifaceted, it is everywhere and nowhere, then Valran suggests that “chance” hides providence, some higher authority, invisible plans of existence. He perceives each combination as an encrypted message and tries to decode and interpret it to the best of his ability and ability. What is calling for the audience.

“In his new project, Valery Valran continues to study the boundary conditions of creation, forcing us to think again about the radical issues of metaphysics that concern the artist. For example, the following question: if God creates the world from nothing (ex nihilo), then where does chance come from as the most important mode of being? Was it (chance) created and continues to be created each time again, or was chance nothing in this very composition, from which our world with its laws was created? And solving this issue, Valran demonstrates that he, like no one else, is able to use the refined arguments of art for setting crucial metaphysical experiments ”(Alexander Sekatsky).

“In the case of Valery Valran, love for things chosen by the artist is akin to prayer or a spell: wherever the artist moves in his work, there is an initial circle of images, the return to which is each time postulated as an indisputable reality, a life maxim that has unconditional power. Recently, the artist is occupied with the combinatorics of numbers, images, techniques, materials, states according to the principle of randomness, so the unpredictability of the result seems to be the main intrigue of the process of creating works. The game, in which the viewer is involved, however, has rules: these are the specified canvas formats, source images and a set of colors. By combining them, one can initiate “random” meetings, involuntary dialogues, clashes of meanings, the birth of discovery, as well as looking at things with new eyes ”(Gleb Ershov).

Valery Valran (born 1949) has been painting since 1970. The first experiments were in the manner of expressive abstractionism under the influence of J. Pollock and E. Mikhnov-Voitenko.

He has been participating in exhibitions since 1976 - first in unofficial apartment exhibitions, and since 1979 - in exhibition halls and galleries. Member of more than 120 group projects in Russia, Germany, Switzerland, France, England, USA, Japan. 48 personal exhibitions.

Author of books: “Leningrad underground” (2003), “Museum and Society” (2015), “Soviet Photography. 1917-1955 ”(2016). Compiled and edited 14 art albums.

His works are in the State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), in the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, in the Museum of Nonconformist Art (St. Petersburg), in the National Gallery of the Komi Republic (Syktyvkar), in the Römerhall Museum (Germany), in the Museum of Modern Russian art, Jersey City (USA), in the Tver Regional Art Gallery, in the Yaroslavl Museum of Art, in the Arkhangelsk Museum of Fine Arts, in the Central Museum of Communications named after A. S. Popova (St. Petersburg), at the Erarta Museum of Modern Art (St. Petersburg), at the Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House (St. Petersburg).