Syntax Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Vikentiy Nilin, in which the artist showcases minimalist wooden objects grounded in short textual statements. It took the artist several decades to strip these works of everything superfluous—everything unnecessary, everything that burdened the structure or interfered with perception.

The exhibition features works begun over the past three to four decades, but brought to a market-ready state only now—at a time when their innovativeness raises serious doubts, and when the bankruptcy of discourse as such is no longer disputed by anyone.

Among the reasons that prevented Nilin from completing these works in due time—besides a chronic lack of resources (which accompanies almost every artist throughout life and at times becomes the principal content of their practice)—are the following:

a lack of professional skills;
illogically structured production processes;
an inability to manage time;
a tendency to construct projects that are knowingly unviable;
an obsessive focus on minor, insignificant details at the expense of the whole;
an unhealthily high level of self-demand;
excessive susceptibility to the myths of the professional community;
blind faith in the authorial statement;
the fetishization of art as a way of life, leading to an inevitable transformation of personal motivation, in which simple values lose their appeal, communicative skills atrophy, the tentacles connecting the individual to society beyond the professional milieu wither away, and the individual finds themselves in a social vacuum;
a false understanding of the function of art as a tool for understanding the world rather than as a market instrument—which is what it is in a healthy system of relations;
an imitative instinct that compels the copying of behavioral models from fifty years ago;
a desire to astonish or shock the viewer instead of honestly entertaining their envy of more successful colleagues;
dependence on hierarchical relations within the community, sometimes taking the form of servility, sometimes of negation and protest;
a refusal to perceive the communicative dimension of one’s activity as a tool, instead endowing it with the features of an autonomous project;
a lack of faith in one’s own abilities;
a panicked fear of failure on the one hand, and anxiety that the world might be turned upside down if it were to see a finished work on the other;
fear of responsibility for a direct statement, prompting the use of pseudonyms;
as well as poor health, modesty, and a general neurotic disposition.

P.K.