Alexander Burganov’s Alternative Worlds and Visual Ideograms

Abstract

Summary: The creative work of famous Russian sculptor Alexander Nikolayevich Burganov in the context of a system of copyright signs and conventional symbols, the artist’s relationship with the world and himself from the standpoint of symbolic valency which combines two forms of sculptural expressiveness – figurative and abstract art, are analyzed in the article. Considering hidden comparisons in Burganov’s work, the author analyzes the mythological and metaphorical thinking of the artist who appeals to invariable ancient images and surreal poetics that ultimately form an organic constellation of images and their harmonious completeness. Alexander Burganov’s sculptures are a productive space for an ambivalent play of many meanings and visual tautologies. The artist’s original reflections involve visual patterns that the sculptor articulates in his works: tradition and antiquity, cultural memory and modern philosophical contexts, semiotics of drapery/folds, a cage as a special sign, a symbol. The sculptor’s image paradigm also develops at the intersection of visual and verbal contexts, although the word as such is absent; however, the narrative discourse is obvious. The use of diverse semantics of sculpture-gestures plays an important role. Alexander Burganov’s sculptures, establishing a movable border between tradition and the historical avant-garde, reduce and reproduce new cultural meanings. Overcoming the boundaries of artistic optics and recreating new polystylism, he models a special lightness of sculpture and mobility of images in his sculptural works. The author draws attention to the sculptor’s ability to combine the most diverse layers of culture thus translating the artist’s original semantics based on allusions and allegories giving the viewer the right to independently navigate through the mazes of visual memory. The author emphasizes that the dialogue between the artist and the audience through symbolically abstract signs begins to model new forms of artistic matter and affect the human ordering of the world. Burganov’s artistic practice recreates the space of another reality – the world behind the looking glass of everyday life. The sculptor’s alchemy is such that the viewer immerses into the space of spiritual worlds, comprehends the sculptural plasticity and its expressiveness using the language of allegories and symbols. The observer establishes the inner essence of things, hidden conceptual impulses, tries to discover the spiritual in the material.