Perhaps the first step in the transition to modern art was that I gave up figureless painting. At the institute, and a few years after, I was writing naturmorets, landscapes — and at some point, interest in it was lost. But at the same time, I was making engravings in dry needle technology on large zinc boards; I was doing an ofort, aquatinth. This deep printing technology gave me a very accurate sense of surface relief. And from the gravel, from this feeling of topography, I went to the huge redi-meades and assemblies. And after these experiments, the unfigurative paintings that you’ve been doing for quite some time. Perhaps these works — often done on a wooden basis, on old cut and cracked drawing boards, for example — are better regarded as objects, but for me, it’s such an almost aromatic painting with minimal relief. I’ve been doing all this for, like, 10 years before I finally went to the video.

In 1997, I had a large and very important exhibition at the Russian Museum of Aleksandra Mitlyansky. Valery Orlov, that’s what it was called. Of the eight halls of the Marble Palace, four were filled with exactly my work in the last 10 years, and when I saw them all at once (the tiny workshop did not allow it), it became clear to me that everything I could do in this technology had already been done. At first, it was a very vague feeling rather than an awareness; perhaps it would have come later had it not been for this exhibition. I went back to Moscow and spent another year and a half trying to finish some work. It was rather difficult to decide to give up what had lived for many years and to start looking for new means of expression.

The transition to the video art wasn’t easy. I have to say, since 1996, I’ve started taking pictures. I had Nikon 90s and a few lenss, of which my favorite was macro. Then Valery Orlov and I took a few photo videos of the projects — actually, Valery was the one who encouraged me to take the picture. And at the end of 1997, he brought me a video camera, which for a very long time then we just had no business: I didn’t know what to film and whether to try at all. And one day at the Dynamo subway station, I saw a rocking lamp — a white light ball that was more and more rocky when the train approached — and I realized why I had a video camera. Then, in 1998, Orlov and I made a photo video of the Metro project, one of the most important projects for me, because it started my video work. And then, I guess I finally stopped doing things with my hands.

I’d say that painting and video art have more in common than, say, video art and movies. Painting can be seen as long as video, partly because it may change over time, although it is not as obvious as video. Move a little to the left, a little to the right, turn your head, step back — and paint, minimally, but change. And these tiny vibrations in time, the surface relief gives us a long look. The movie, let’s say, tells the story more, and the video shows how things happen. In fact, the video artist replaces the paint and brushes on the camera, and the monitor, the projection, on the canvas.

The painting story is over, probably because I realized I didn’t want to make things. There was a sense of excitement and awe out of the work process, which was before when the final result was unpredictable. I already knew what would happen; the feeling of a wonderful thing had gone away. And in the video, even by simply recording what I was able to see, I’m just as excited and surprised as I was when I was doing painting.

Working with an up-to-date topic about an event that everyone can hear is not a guarantee that the works are modern. It’s more important to have a sense of time in the work. What matters is what language and means of expression you use, how appropriate they are today.

Why is «Metro» important to me — besides the fact that it actually started my work with a video camera? This project was a two- or multi-channel, depending on the space, photo video installation. Lightboxes with natural photographs of the communication hatches were placed on the shelf and the viewers moved between them. People came to the exhibition, Moscowites mostly — and in the '90s almost everyone was on the subway alone — and many asked, «Where did you see this? It was clear that this „suprematic“ painting under the feet, these crazy swinging balls, people don’t notice, even though it was in front of them almost every day. It was at that time that I thought that „seeing“ and „seeing“ were not the same thing. And it became important for me to be able to see „other“ things.

And the second project, «When I’m home alone», was done relatively recently, but in a sense started when I was doing figure painting: in the early 1980s, I lived in a house where there was a lot of small plastic work by Matveyev, Frih Hara, Sotnikova; porcelain figures — boys, ballerinas, pigeons occupied all the free surfaces of mosquitoes, cupboards and buffets, and then I noticed these figures, from time to time, changing their location, as if they were interacting with each other. Then this theme was translated into a «Beautiful for All» project with Valery Orlov, and already during the pandemic, I did quite a lot of work about the lives of things around us, about how they live their lives.