ANDREI BARTENYEV (Russia)
The world in which Andrei Bartenyev lives is a materialization of chaos.
But his disorder is good, light, and full of positive emotion. In chaos he sees “the source of movement, of existence”. Andrei admits that, first of all, he is an artist, and only a director to a smaller extent. “My job is to direct chaos, and I want to achieve a level of mastery”. Bartenyev (nee Andrei Bartenshtein, Andrew Barten, Andre von Bartenshtaichikovyazon, Irzhi Bartenovsky) is one of the most famous representatives of today’s young artists. He works in the genre of collage, decoupage, linear graphics, pastels and installations. His performances – Botanical Ballet, Sleeping Beauties, The Snow Queen, Mineral Water, Underwear for Africa, etc. – are hard to take as anyone else’s work, and yet each seems to have been created by different people.
This is an artist for whom experiments with form, texture and color have become the most important part of the creative process. His characters actors are dressed in papier mache and children’s toys, balloons and tin boxes. And his productions are like a trip through space, bringing us to an unexplored planet inhabited by foreign creatures.
I bring to a space a disassembled world, ready for the creation of a new civilization, and I begin fr om these elements to assemble chaos, my chaos, wh ere 35 people are the stage armed with my equipment, each one with his incomprehensible improvisation, unknown to me. And all of this is accompanied by raucous music. Even better, if it is accompanied by a flood of noise (which I am aiming for in the future): 150 televisions playing different channels, all kinds of music coming over loudspeakers, and each of the thousands of participants listening to his own over headphones. Now that’s an ideal performance! And I fly somewhere, my eyes not smaller than the Sun, and each of my hands, like Victoria Falls, but not cascading downward. Just the opposite - gathering up all of the energy of this chaos.
Andrey Bartevev