The genesis of this otherness can be traced to Chernyshev’s ongoing “Suburban Practices”—a project which sees the artist erecting seemingly alien, out-of-place structures—a bus stop, a totem monument, a castle—within an unnamed forest near Nizhny Novgorod. By inserting these recognizable yet dislocated symbols into a historically barren setting, Chernyshev catalyzes a transfiguration of environment from spatial convention to one of “strangeness,” probing the boundaries between the familiar and the foreign. Given that the core of his art lies in practices of contemplative, cognition-driven observation, it’s unsurprising that his site-specific installations—haphazardly affixed in the forest and doomed for obscurity—demand to be “wanted to be seen”: until recently, one had to contact the artist directly through his website to obtain the coordinates of these “unearthly places.” In the exhibition’s smaller hall, a carousel projector cycles through photo documentation of these “underground” practicesalongside other projects spanning the artist’s decade-long career.

Chernyshev’s graphics presented within the exhibition further exemplify the artist’s preoccupation with meditative, contemplative art—work that necessitates a recalibration of perception. His “dark screens” or hard-to-traverse landscapes emerge through the process of rubbing carbon paper pigment onto textured white sheets, a technique that implies a degree of experimentation and prolonged interaction with the emerging topographies. The dynamic traces of their making lead to paper cuts, surface destruction, and consequently, the formation of physical volume effects evocativeof natural phenomena—rippling waters, smoky skies, meteor showers, air currents.

In opposition to his graphic pieces, Chernyshev has created a mural across the gallery’s wall: a scattering of barely perceptible silver stars adrift against a field of white. While eschewingthe sort of flashy visual effects, this imageserves to balance the exhibition, mediating between the thematic poles that drive the artist’s practice—spontaneity and control, the finite and the infinite, entropy and creation. The star, a recurring index in Chernyshev’s semiotic lexicon, functions as a symbol rich in cultural resonance, one that migrates across his diverse body of work. The star’s centrality to Chernyshev’s art is such that he has even been dubbed a “stargazer” in one publication.

Also prominent in Chernyshev’s visual vocabulary are the forms of the arch and rainbow—mythologems that further elaborate the idea of transition and liminality. Represented in the exhibition by two works, “Rooted Rainbow III”(2023-2024) and “Rooted Rainbow IV” (2022-2024), these arched wooden panels are crafted from reclaimed materials sourced in a former garden cooperative near Nizhny Novgorod (painting on wood being a hallmark of the Tikhaya studio). Upon these panels, Chernyshev labors equally with surface and depth, gradually scratching out patterns and applying layers of gouache, acrylic and fixatives. As the surfaces accrue complexity through this process of accumulation and erasure, the gap between the signified and the signifier widens: through the mechanism of repetitions—where the intricate web of iterations is meant to define the contours of “otherness,” Chernyshev seeks to address the problem of the multiplicity of actual manifestations inherent in nature and being.