ART Habens Art Review ART Habens Art Review - Special Issue #97 | Page 167

Maksim Kuznetcov ART Habens philosophical issue. I attempt to capture these in my sculptures. I don’t do sketches on paper, but rather I go directly to find the balance of curves and lines in a 3D object. I find this way of working much more natural for me to land on something that looks ‘right’ to me. I try allowing my subconscious to lead the sculpting process, rather than having a strict conscious control. Sometimes, when working on a series of sculptures with a common subject arc, I prepare small plastellin sketches before I start working on the full-size pieces. Before coming up with the realisation of Empty Virgins, I produced a series of works simply titled Virgins. I wanted to see if I could tell a story of emotions though simple slightly abstracted human figures. I have ended up choosing women as the carrier for my emotional metamorphosis experiment. Although when I finished the pieces, I found that they are lacking the ability to speak to observers via the subconscious (as I mentioned before). I wanted to reinforce the message and make it less anchored to symbols such as female sexuality or fertility, even very reduced facial characteristics were distracting, I noticed. I aimed the sculptures to talk not just from their positive surfaces and curves but to allow the message to come from within them, from inside. Through a series of experiments, I have come up with ‘doppelgangers’ of the original virgins, which in my opinion have a much more developed language that is hardly to be understood 21 4 06 Special Issue