Aleksandr Vladimirovich Nuss

Aleksandr Vladimirovich Nuss | Like Ash Settling On The Eyelashes | 2024

Your practice involves sanding, erasing, and transforming printed images. What first led you to this unique method of working with existing supports such as catalogues, posters, or photographs?

The development of my seanding practice was quite gradual but also fairly swift… The action was more conscious than I was myself at that time (2022)… The creative act has its own awareness; it knows and sees before the artist does… It perceives distant connections and relationships: in my case, the abrasive act was already aware of its relation to an earlier process, namely frottage (2018/2020). Both revealed to me the deep, submerged energy beneath the printed image. Working on images found in catalogues, posters, or photographs allows me to maintain a mobile and dynamic approach during the process… On reflection, it also makes me realize how subtle and sometimes fragile the image is under the hands—or why not—the yoke of the artist.

How do you decide whether an image will be completely erased, partially revealed, or left to “survive” in its altered form?

It’s not really a decision but more of an intuition… It’s what I feel about the structure, colors, shadows, and lights of an image, and how much I resonate, relate, or oppose its observed forms that leads me to take positions and pause in areas of visual-perceptual interest.

Sandpaper and abrasive sponges are unusual artistic tools. Do you see them more as instruments of destruction, of transformation, or both?

I wouldn’t call them unusual… Maybe just rarely used in contemporary drawing. Yet the poetic legacies of Robert Rauschenberg, as Sara Fontana mentioned a few years ago during the presentation of my “Untitled” (2022) at the “Premio Città di Treviglio”, and William Kentridge’s legacy are still vibrant and relevant. Over the years, I’ve come to see them as companion tools, guides to explore the submerged, underground flow of images. I can’t say if it’s destruction, construction, or reconstruction… I do know they are more like apparitions or whispered dialogues, and it’s hard to keep that in mind—so my results are what I’ve managed, despite myself, to remember and carry forward from what the images have passed on to me.

Many of your works seem to oscillate between presence and absence, memory and disappearance. Is this tension a metaphor for broader human or cultural experiences?

I experience each image, just as you say, as a possibility of oscillation between presence and absence, apparition and disappearance, memory and forgetting, between “Mnemosyne” and “Lethe”, the two Orphic rivers. It is about facing images and embracing this as an open, dynamic, and evolving spiritual journey. In this way, image after transformed image shapes a micro and macro cosmos, a compositional, sign-based, and internal dramaturgy of images. The support, the paper, is the boundary where the original image is inscribed and printed, within which gestures, rhythms, and tensions act. Through observation, I perceive them as whispers, so I dwell on them, focusing precisely on those points and begin working from those suggestions, following mental and perceptual signs—much like the mystical Kabbalists with the repeated and combined letters of God, or like Giulio Camillo’s ordering and juxtaposition of symbolic and meaningful images for mnemonic techniques. Thus, the organism of the image that lives beneath the surface is given a voice.

Aleksandr Vladimirovich Nuss | What Is Light, What Will Become Is Light | 2024

How important is the role of time in your works—for example, the gradual erosion of images versus the sudden act of erasure?

Considering images as organisms and structures where forces and tensions interact, and the means I use to reform the image, time plays a central role. Its presence is at least twofold: the time of the act and the time of the image. The first is instinctive, immediate, and swift; the second is reflective, slowed, and anachronistic because it carries references and fragments of past and distant images and times. Erasure, like Lucio Fontana’s cuts and holes, is necessary not so much to enter a space within and beyond the canvas, but rather within and beyond the time of images.

Aleksandr Vladimirovich Nuss | Breaths Wandering | 2023

You moved from Russia to Italy at a very young age and studied both sculpture and painting in Bologna. How did these experiences influence your artistic language?

I was born in Saratov, Russia, and since 2001 I have grown up in Italy, but it was not a simple relocation—it was an adoption by an Italian family. It hasn’t been so much the places where I studied sculpture and painting that influenced me, but rather the people I met with whom I was able to deepen my understanding of who I am today—my education, my visual, poetic, and spiritual culture. Some aspects of my Slavic heritage have managed to survive in the present, interacting with what I was taught and inherited in Italy.

Aleksandr Vladimirovich Nuss | For Every Act, Oblivion Is Needed | 2024

What directions do you see your research taking in the next years? Do you plan to continue working with erasure, or to explore new forms of dialogue with images?

My first solo exhibition is currently in preparation, and my visual research will continue. It will evolve in step with the exhibition’s design choices: sometimes the abraded support will remain physical and tangible; other times, by sanding slides or acetates, the image will become pure projected light. Through abrasion, I believe and hope to rethink and complete a still unrealized project: the “Books of Dreams 2004-2024.”