Fountain. Saratov, Volga

An architect by education, Misha Le Jen turned to performance art in 1990, inspired, as he says, by the Foucault pendulum in St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg. He had the idea of making a painting using the movement of the Earth. To make it, he built a flying machine he called Leplane‑a suspension device that fixed the artist's body in the air, allowing him to assume a new position in relation to the painting surface. He later defined his performances as “consistent rejection of the superfluous in favor of pure action, a striking gesture.”

Le Jen interacts with nature and life as a combination of forces that are beyond human control, yet fascinating to study and live. He inherited his interest in the world around him and his approach to creativity as a practice that is integrated into life and natural for a human being from his grandmother, the well‑known Saratov artist Valentina Chelintsova. A positive and active view of the world‑which means the artist is full of hope and enthusiasm in their creative impulse‑seeks simplification rather than complexity, which brings Le Jen's work closer to the craft of inventors rather than to a fundamentally hermetic conceptualism that denounces reality.

To date he has created over sixty actions, some of which were documented in the eight volumes of Catalogues of Actions covering the period from 1993 to 2007.

The action Fountain was one of his most difficult ideas to create. It took a year and a half to prepare. The artist spoke to engineers, firefighters, and harbor workers so that his flight would look plausible. In the end, to make the action happen, he borrowed a GP‑21 hydro‑loader from the river port. Le Jen’s walk on a cloud of splashes lasts only a few seconds and he shows his excitement at seeing his work transform the power of water into a poetic metaphor for the artist's freedom to create in both nature and society.