Of the artists currently alive, only German Vinogradov works every year with the support of the Earth’s axis, but the mysteries revealed to the virtuoso Vinogradov-shaman remain invisible to the rest. And so Andrey Gorbunov hints to us that there is a great concrete clamp that links everything in the world, and immediately refutes this arrangement. Everything that revolves around Gorbunov’s vertex is debris. This swarm of asteroids is made up of body parts, fragments of mechanisms and scraps of printed text. All of these pieces are drawn to one another, sticking to the surface of crystal-like formations. Bone and iron, fragments of medical and astrological texts, mix in a vault of centaurish, incredibleinformation. These not-quite-objects are cramped by the titanic mass of the global library of human knowledge, squashing between the pages of fossilized discourse into the thinnest of sheets. Bones and spines, connecting rods and crankshafts are depicted in Gorbunov’s drawings precisely and fundamentally. As if they are illustrations in an atlas of anatomy or machine construction. Contour maps of bodies that are emphatically two-dimensional. These bodies, an anatomy of the skull and mechanical joints and junctions traced out in black chalk, entice and attract us to the surface of the vertex just as the glimmering of wheels under the bulk of a train attracted Anna Karenina. The attraction to a conversion of basic elements and constituent parts is the basis of rational knowledge, and Gorbunov’s cycle, with a primary school didacticism, indicates the extent to which the capabilities of the rational are limited.
The variety of the physical world subjected to the laws of mechanics is not unlimited. The sum of combinations of the primary elements is finite, and the border of the universe lies on the surface of the vertex of a body that is impossible in the physical world. These whitish, deliberately colorless crystalloids are body-deceptions, as if invented by Escher. Their shapes are invisible to three-dimensional vision, they disappear, merging into the empty cosmos surrounding them. It is as if the entire physical world, sticking to the surface of the vertex, ignores its form. The secret is lies in the fact that Gorbunov’s painting is like the renowned cube-illusion: flesh and metal, newspaper cuttings and reproductions fall into the vertex not because we can’t conceive of (or depict) its form, but because we ourselves are bodiless.
The recalculation of conceptions and the growth of the sum of information only results in the outer boundary of knowledge being brought nearer. Despite the great variety of combinations of elements, their number is not infinite. This circumstance is well known to lovers of secret sciences and the followers of Doctor Grof, it breaks through to the surface of mass culture in the grandiose edifice of post-apocalyptic literature and film. That boundary of old knowledge that in Russian literature in the Noughties was given the very accurate title of “Total P**ets,” which we might liberally translate from the Russian as “Totally F***ed Up,” after the end of the grooviness of post-modernism, is no longer interlaced with a romantic web as was the case with Lem or Azimov (here we should recall the collapse of the Vortex constructed on total knowledge of the world in John Boorman’s Zardoz), nor draped in the torn laces of neo-expressionism. The informational collapse on the scales of Anubis has outweighed the sum of information, and the modern situation can be depicted without the aid of rose-tinted spectacles, by using sterile, almost medical methods. The lunar surface of Gorbunov’s vertex’s, the old newspapers and skulls, are merely hints at past allegories, the fabric of which has become too delicate. Knowledge is powerless, and the painting of Andrey Gorbunov is an excellent illustration of this.