Syntax Gallery is pleased to present a joint exhibition of works by Kirill Lebedev (Kto) and Tatiana Budyak.

The solemn definition of 'artistic dynasty' does not seem to fit Tatiana Budyak and Kirill Kto. After all, a dynasty usually implies an alternative to education, a family 'academy' where secrets of craftsmanship are passed down from one generation to another – not in the classroom but through the air – thanks to the very atmosphere of the home workshop itself. But the mother, a physical engineer by profession, and the son, whose only profession has been street art, are both autodidacts, having mastered their respective crafts – mosaic and text compositions – independently, carving their paths for themselves. Besides, a dynasty suggests a free ticket into the world of art, with the young following in the footsteps of their elders. But it was the son, already an acclaimed master of Russian street art by the age of 25, who helped his aspiring designer mother to embark on her exhibition career. And yet they can be regarded as a dynasty as the artists are bound by the tension of internal conflict: between the utopia of free art in public spaces and the interior easel painting practice, between the intimate format and monumental ambitions, between the dream of the street and the reality of the room, ever leaving which is a mistake, as we are well aware.

Tatiana Budyak's mosaics, created with tile shards instead of smalt, are small in scale, yet easy to mistake for sketches of giant decorative panels. These alleged sketches involuntarily remind us of the monumental art dating back to The Thaw the Era of Stagnation, utterly schematic or totally abstract mosaic compositions that were conceived as part of the architectural ensembles of Soviet post-war modernism. In the 1960s, this reserve of modernism was Zelenograd, the Soviet microelectronics capital, where Tatyana Budyak worked as an engineer and where Kirill Kto was born and later drifted across the city, digging up tiles for his mother's mosaics in rubbish tips or buildings signed off for demolition. It is this rubbish that makes up memories of a failed future – in the 1990s, when the utopia of the science town had been resigned to the past, Zelenograd mosaics, like all of those throughout the entire former USSR, were starting to deteriorate or get dismantled.

However, the outdated monumental project was replaced by a different, spontaneous one: the concrete jungle of modernist districts turned out to be a natural habitat for hip-hop culture and graffiti: by the end of the 1990s, Kirill Kto was responsible for organising the first graffiti festivals in Zelenograd. Soviet monumentalism and post-Soviet street art: the fact that mother and son turn to successive forms of urban design paradoxically reflects dynastic continuity. The utopia of anarchist street art bit the dust fairly quickly as well: social networks, urban appropriation, anti-vandalism campaigns – all of these drove the artist from the streets and into the studio. But the playful multi-coloured Cyrillic of Kirill Kto, even when taken from the wall to the canvas, preserves the memory of the language of the street, of living colloquial speech.

This speech was overheard by a linguistically sophisticated ear, sensitive to idioms and non-translatable wordplay. 'Hey you, smart arse! What are you, an idiot?' – the viewer clearly sees that the two questions, seemingly opposite in their meaning, are in fact a tautology. Conceptual art that holds so much significance for Kirill Kto knew its way around tautologies, just as surrealism did – around misspellings and mispronunciation. Through simple amendments, the aggressive 'take away and divide' turns into the humanistic 'embrace and love', and the cowardly 'what if something happens' melds with the defeatist 'it backfired'. In the manner of conceptual photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher who compiled typologies of industrial structures, Kirill Kto, immersed in the elements of Russian phraseology, has been increasingly resorting to the linguistic collecting technique, compiling typologies of colloquialisms. For example, putting together a collection of nouns with negative prefixes that came from Latin, from discredit-ation to debility-sation, or turning 'blue coats' into 'white coats' using verbal sequencing. At times this sounds like poetry, as in the toponymic quatrain 'Nizhny Tagil, Vyshny Volochek, Velikiye Luki, Stary Oskol'. But more often, collections of idioms that have existed from time immemorial and are essentially poetic acquire editorial relevance: 'Lying on the road standing on the sidelines keeping your mouth shut sitting on suitcases', 'Born with a caul roll up your sleeves tighten your belts hot under the collar hit in the hat jump out of your pants'. The spirit of the times of confusion, powerlessness and hopelessness is perfectly expressed in the humorous and idiomatic question 'How can you delay drying out so as not to wet yourself?' By taking graffiti from the wall to canvas, Kirill Kto has expertly mastered the art of translation from street to 'Aesopian': the inscription saying 'Russian Field for Experiments' is placed against the blood-red backdrop with a rake pattern. Yes, the proverbial one you step on whenever you make the same mistake repeatedly.

Anna Tolstova