THE MACHINE OF MEANING
At a time when most images of reality are made by machines for machines, and when humanity is trying to comprehend the future of artificial intelligence and its significance for the transformation of human subjectivity, the title of Alexei Korsi's exhibition seems obvious and predictable. But it, like a first glance at the exhibition, encapsulates the subterfuge which is also the main subject of the project's investigation. The machine the artist refers to is not the sum of its parts, or other machines and algorithms made by man, nor the tool which made the perfect sky gradient, but our brain whose operations are limited by the experience and knowledge of the world around us which that experience programs.
Corsi is a contemporary art philosopher who deals with the basic categories of human existence and aesthetics: the will, the sublime, the mechanisms of symbolisation, the real and the abstract. This is a rare consistency and tenacity of the artist, who thinks of his practice as a grand project, trying to give form to phenomena that define us, despite their inexhaustibility and apparent simplicity of meaning. The artist's main lyrical protagonist (even if we never see him in the works themselves) is a man confused in the face of the complexity of the world, which only increases with our increasing knowledge of it. The central concern of Corsi's practice is to question rather than to create material objects.
The perfect, seemingly completely uncreated details of an unidentifiable mechanism on the wall are not a hint of technological progress or collapse, but almost literally (through the chrome surface) a mirror of our cognitive faculties, exposing the "convexity" of our perception. Through the sheen, the symmetry, the deliberate display of functionality (the parts have no "artistic" fasteners or other extraneous add-ons), Corsi tricks the mind of the viewer, transforming a pure abstraction into an element of some mechanism, and the whole into a kind of "skeleton" of an unknown machine.
The series "Arches" work with the same mechanism of our consciousness but does not produce a whole through its parts. Instead it allows the viewer to "produce" space by dividing the infinite, because it is by dividing that we establish our frame of reference. Corsi places arches in the path of the spectator towards another part of the exhibition, but does not prescribe precise rules of conduct, leaving them to the discretion of the spectator.
The silkscreens in the "Machine of Order" series also work on "humanising" space, reconciling it with our cognitive abilities and habits. Works on the limits of the media are reminiscent of the cyanometer created by Horace Benedict de Saussure in the second half of the eighteenth century, which allowed the determination of fifty-three colour nuances of the sky by comparing the sky before the eyes of an experimenter with a table of samples.
By creating abstract works, Corsi in fact constructs a statement on "the human" - the possibilities and shortcomings of our thinking, the main author of our picture of the world around us, in which there is always something beyond what is visible.
Anna Zhurba
