To walk with Africa: artist Bugaev made "Puzzles" for Muscovites
Puzzles are not child's play, but an adult attempt to understand how life works and what to do if the usual language no longer works. At Sistema Gallery, Sergey Bugaev, an Afrika artist, musician, actor, and hero of the Leningrad underground, invited Muscovites to play this game seriously. At the opening of his Rebus exhibition, the audience deciphered not words, but meanings: they peered into copper signs, looked for support in Cyrillic symbols, and together with the author tried to answer the main question — how to talk about the world when the language itself became a mystery. The details are in the Izvestia report.
From the underground to the codes of consciousness
In the spacious halls of the Sistema Gallery, dozens of art lovers gathered for the opening of two exhibitions at once — Sergey Bugaev's Rebus-Africa and Go. Gone. Gone. anonymous Kalmyk artist Southside Grooven. However, the focus was on Bugaev-Afrika's work.
When the young Sergei Bugaev came to Leningrad from Novorossiysk in the early 1980s, he did not yet know that he would become a name embodying the search for a new language in art. He found himself in the epicenter of the avant-garde: he met Sergei Kuryokhin and became a member of his Pop Mechanics, worked with the groups Kino, Aquarium, and Sounds of Mu, and became one of the youngest active participants in the New Artists movement led by Timur Novikov, a collective that shaped the aesthetics of the Leningrad underground. In 1987, Bugaev appeared in the cult film Assa by Sergei Solovyov as Bananan, and forever cemented his status not only as an artist, but also as a cultural symbol of the generation.
— Every movie is a rebus, but the movie "Assa" is a special rebus. Many still do not understand why it was necessary to take pictures of historical places where, for example, the hero is reading a book about the murder of Paul I. There are a lot of riddles sewn into the structure of the film, which, like in my puzzles, have no answer," Bugaev told Izvestia.
Sergey Bugaev in the film "Assa"
Musical experiments and performances have become just a starting point. I realized early on that the main thing is not the effect, but the semantic depth. Already in the late 1980s, he created a series of works exploring the semiotics of mass culture and Soviet ideology, including the famous "Anti-Lisitsky" series, in which he addressed the images of the avant-garde and propaganda posters, reinterpreting them with irony and deep historical analysis.
Quantum puzzles on copper sheets
Rebus is not just a collection of copper paintings, but a territory where not only the artist works, but also any viewer who comes. Each object is a cipher, but unlike the text puzzles familiar from childhood, Bugaev's riddles do not add up to an unambiguous message. They contain a lot of faces, symbols, and letters, primarily Cyrillic. These metal canvases are not static objects, but events.: they require engagement, as if the viewer becomes a co-author of a visual dialogue.
— In Mongolia, all the words are written in our native language — Cyrillic with the letters "W", "W", "I", "B", which we all love and know. Now this language, our language, is experiencing a huge tragedy, a crisis. These reflections gave rise to the desire to create a large work from the series of "Puzzles", where you will not find a single Latin letter," the artist explained.
Artist Sergey Bugaev-Africa at the opening of his exhibition "REBUS" at Sistema Gallery
Africa himself used to redraw puzzles from magazines as a child, and years later this archive became the richest material for artistic research. Plates with copied puzzles from newspapers and magazines are also presented at the exhibition. For 30 years, his puzzles have traveled the world — from New York to Yakutia.
In the center of the exhibition are monumental canvases from the 2020s, including "QuRebus" — "quantum rebus", where a whirlwind of symbols seems to reveal a new universe, taking a look deep into invisible semantic structures. It's not just a painting, but a space that you can mentally enter like a maze.
Nearby is the "Fourfold Unsolved Puzzle", an attempt to build order within chaos. Instead of an answer, there is a window of opportunity where the clash of images seems to say: meaning is not given to us in a ready-made form, it must be experienced.
Visitors stop and lean over the copper panels. The copper darkens, glitters, reflects the exhibition space and the faces of the audience, turning into a mirror of time and memory. This material is not just a surface, but a fabric on which perceptual events unfold.
The artist explains that the creation of each work is a unique process, more like developing a photograph than painting. Copper sheets with the applied pattern are placed in special chemical solutions, due to which the material acquires shades of red, purple, brown or green. The exhibition presents plates that have not been exposed to alkalis, salts and acetone, as well as those that have undergone acid metamorphosis. The latter are covered with a patina, which gives the puzzles not only the effect of aging, but also a sense of semantic immortality.
Cultural aphasia as an art field
The main theme of the exhibition sounds like a challenge: how to speak when a common language is lost? Africa, which survived the end of the Soviet era, sees in this not only a historical rift, but also a radical cultural transformation. Soviet culture, according to his observation, was like a huge rebus contract: common symbols and images united people into a single system of meaning, and their disintegration led to a kind of "cultural aphasia" - the loss of a common narrative. The pioneer tie, the hammer and sickle, and the red star are a cultural code understandable to millions. In this sense, Bananan, Bugaev's character in Ass, is also a symbol.
— Rebus is our whole life. In an inexorably changing world, it is important for us to find a foothold. But the most important thing is to teach this to our children, who will have to build a future," the artist said in an interview with Izvestia.
It is here that the artistic method of Africa is formed: it does not invent new puzzles, but works with fragments of an already guessed world, turning them into meta-signs — art and philosophy at the same time. This is not an attempt to give an answer, but an invitation to reflection.
There were no silent observers at the opening: everyone stared, tried to figure out the words, and saw references to Proust, quantum physics, and the Soviet avant-garde in the puzzles. Africa explicitly states: "My puzzles don't have the right answer. There is only an experience of meaning," and it is precisely in this experience that the main power of the exhibition lies.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
