“ In my paintings i want to reveal the laws of preexistence

and being, the mysteries of existence, the chaos and the

cosmos, the masculine and feminine...”                               Igor Novikov

NTRODUCTION TO CONFIGURATIVITY

Art and life are not the same thing, but they must unite in myself in the integrity of my responsibility. Anyway, if you don’t think of life and art with so much responsibility, you feel like being a grass, like growing and nothing else (the sun, the rain). Or you feel just being a bird that flies and pecks and nothing more (archeopterix). And you wish you got fossilized later to leave an exquisite, unobtrusive but eternal imprint.

But you also wish to be just to look and to see everything you can see around yourself, i.e. both life and art.

Configurativity as the capability of form to hold a number of meanings has been known long ago. Even the most rigid meaning allows for a certain vibration of the message. It ist he degree of the manifestation of a quality that is meant here, it ist he capability of form to become infinitely thin, while acquiring utmost capacity to contain meanings without disappearing or loosing transparency.

I G O R    NOVIKOV

Configurativity is a scarcely known capability of form to belong to any stranger and to manifest itself under a casual eye of an accidental passer-by. The level of meaning still belong to the author in the configurative art, but this level is separated by an infinite distance from concrete realizations and from the message of the art work. The level of message belongs to the spectator.

Configurativity is an unknown yet capability of form to be real, to coincide with reality, it is the capability of form to give the spectator the joy of filling the reality with himself.

In our days the only place to think is the empty space where there is no man. This vacuum does not imply any shortage and it does not require that a lacoon be filled. It is just an expansion of the space where one could start to think again at last. Only philosophical laughter, or in other words, silent laughter can be used to fight back all those who would not think without keeping in mind that it is a man who is thinking, to fight back all these ridiculous forms of reflection.

Life in general is a murderous affair if we look at it through the eyes of a thinking and feeling person.

An illusion is spreading saying that everything man has to face is there only because he has put it there. This illusion produces the last deceptive mirage. Now it seems that man has to face only himself everywhere today. And yet, as a matter of fact, it is himself, i. e. his essence, that man cannot come across anywhere today!.. Will art cultivate the salutary? Nobody can know it. And a bit further he says that when we face naked aesthetics we can no longer feel the essence of art.

A few words in conclusion

Here you have reason to ask what is all that about if nobody has any intentions? What is that configurativity at last? Here you have reason to ask for definitions, for a historical retrospective, for a theory, a method…

But it would not have been configurative at all if we tried to make a learned definition of configurativity. The method would not reveal itself any further. Just as you cannot undress a naked woman. This method is simple. Just chat about your own, about life, about art, about the fact that there are no two separate territories of life and art and that the settled frontier area is not a frontier any longer. And what is it? I don’t know. But the method is simple. Just chat about something, about your own, then say „finita la comedia!“ in conclusion and turn your face to the wall, that very white alabaster wall.

Igor Novikov  Berne 2008