Pinocchio’s Library

After graduating in graphic design from Camberwell (a college of University of the Arts London), Peter Belyi spent a long time working with xylography, creating “giant engravings on Brazilian plywood.” In 1999 he became a full member of the Royal Society of Painter‑Printmakers, which admits only two artists per year. After returning to Russia in the early 2000s Belyi’s creative practice changed radically. He rejected traditional media in favor of creating installations and objects. Using industrial materials, such as concrete, box profile roofing sheets, electric cable, steel rods or particle board, the artist deconstructs utopian projects of the past, revealing the disappointment and unjustified expectations associated with the functioning and subsequent winding down of the Soviet project. Belyi calls his creative method memorial modeling, where a futuristic concept like the “model” is examined in a critical yet nostalgic light.

In creating the installation Pinocchio’s Library, Belyi focused on the image of a1960s architect who is enthused by ambitious ideas of changing the world but is forced to design standard panel‑construction residential buildings. The upward‑focused wooden shelving units are reminiscent of a model of a future urban space that was not destined become reality. The roughly constructed boards are as if doomed to decay and gather dust within one of the numerous Soviet research institutes, eventually becoming a memorial to the last powerful utopian impulse of the twentieth century. Just as knowledge is inaccessible, restricted by rigid censorship and ideological frameworks, so the books in the library cannot be opened and read. The main character in the project, the wooden boy Pinocchio, is concealed within the material of the installation, metaphorically expressing the untapped potential of an entire generation of dreamers.