"Phantom of Freedom" from the "White on White" series

The viewer often associates the artist, despite his long career and a variety of practices, with a single technique or material. Manzoni – excrement, Boyce – felt, Yukker – nails, Christo – packing cloth. If you mercilessly reduce Vladimir Kozin, you will get rubber.

Previously, rubber objects worked in the exhibition space mainly as a three-dimensional sculpture, but now they have acquired a background, turned into high-reliefs, gloomily sparkling like beetle shells. The austere objects placed on Malevich's square-black backgrounds seemed to have frozen on the threshold of eternity. Perception constantly slips from the "poor" plot and material into the unexpectedly majestic interior space of the work. Half of the object world presented in this series are weapons or instruments of causing suffering. The artist had shown machine guns, knives and pistols before, but they were displayed in wire cages like trapped predators. Now they have freed themselves from restrictions and are calmly demonstrating their full-scale presence in modern times.

The name of the project is not only a reference to the famous supremacist primary source. In the avant-garde and subsequent modernist movements, there was often talk about the light coming from a painting, not only reflected, but also generated by it. Kozin inverts this representation so that objects emit darkness. By calling black white, the artist literally visualizes one of the most characteristic features of a lived historical moment.

Text: Alexander Dashevsky