The exhibition “Above the Water” is the artist's first public appearance in six years. It was the result of a great inner work, an experience of faith, inseparable from creativity and finding in it its special refraction. A pronounced metaphysical beginning has always accompanied his practice as an artist. But it is in this project that the ideas of correlation of nature, man and God are consistently carried out in forms that link artistic and theological comprehension of the world together.
Denis Patrakeev's sculptures are weightless - they do not depict the object, but rather mark its invisible trace. There is something of the movements of water jets and droplets caught in the lens in the state of flight in the light cast form. Working on precise and subtle minimalist formulations of forms, the artist is extremely attentive to every gesture. While the very nature of his plasticity cannot be understood as static - it is a living character of fluid forms in the process of metamorphosis, but devoid of drama and struggle.
The work “Circle of Water” floats, reflecting in the eye of the water surface, crowning it with its radiance. The absence of gravity brings a sense of wonder to the perception of the sculpture, when one manages to catch the elusive fluidity of the living form. In essence, we have before us a captured trace of the oscillatory motion not of the water itself, but of the space created by subtracting this form.
This same dialog with space is also the basis of another work, where the same rushing stream of a running brook is disconnected and whirled like a giant kite. It passes through the stone and is pierced by the beam of a spear. This juxtaposition of different types of forms marks the symbolic origin expressed here. The gold circles cast in the shape of a disk also interact with the wild stones in the sculpture series, cutting them in half and crosswise.
The living creation of form is also present in the glittering blob of cast flow that stitches a fan of three planes - the way the pages of a book connect the gold of the thought contained within. The artist allows the form to emerge organically and naturally, listening to its emergence in a world where the universe already lives in a drop of water. A ray of light from a tiny hole in the wall turns out to be an eye into the mystery of the birth of life - through the peephole we see the sea, in the waves of which the bathing boy approaches us and comes ashore.
Gleb Ershov
