Eclipse

Alexey Parygin’s practice encompasses a wide range of media, from painting and drawing to sculpture and installation, but the artist’s book occupies a special place within it. In the late 1980s, Parygin made his first artist’s books (Sand, Colored Sounds, The Green Book), in which illustrations were combined with a poetic text in line with a tradition leading back to William Blake. These early works are unique objects made by hand: from the cover and illustrations, which use batik and colored collage, to the text, which is typed on colored copying paper. By the mid‑1990s the verbal component had lost its role, giving way to purely visual expression. Parygin explores the sign, color, and form, turning the book into an object of contemplation where the accent is on emotional perception and plastic expression.

The basis of Eclipse is a chapter from a physics textbook that covers the mechanics of wave movement. Parygin transforms the scientific text into a visual experiment, covering the pages with abstract compositions or circles and horizontal and vertical lines using aerosol paint and stencils. Black and red, which dominate, create a dynamic contrast referencing the theme of an eclipse, both visual and semantic. The book features numerous mathematical formulae, which show through rhythmically repeated, simple geometric elements, and becomes a field for the interaction of order and chaos, knowledge and intuition.