In her project «Popular Astronomy» Alexandra Paperno expresses the inexpressible. She points out the fact that simple is awfully complicated. What is most important here is that the traditional position of the artist as a genius lecturing the viewer is altered. Here the viewer, who for the past twenty years or so has been required to be an active participant while at the same time has been intimidated and to certain extend victimized, is finally rehabilitated. The viewer is now absolutely equal to the artist in his ability to feel free and joyful. In any case, Alexandra Paperno puts a lot of effort into achieving this. Her position is profoundly ethical and positively moral and, most importantly, her art is seductive and symbolic as indeed art is supposed to be.

The title of the exhibition is taken from a well-known, once popular but now absolutely antiquarian French book* that is filled with tables, pictures, engravings, technical drawings and all possible theories and stories about the night sky. The idea that a lofty and complex science about the stars can have a popular format without loosing its quality is fundamental here. It meets another, American idea of popularity as general accessiblity (we certainly mean Pop Art which, in its own time, remained being an art for the elites). Today, on crossroads of popular science and contemporary art, the project of Alexandra Paperno defines popular (populus, social) as a place of finding of new meanings. Her paintings became simpler, which gives a feeling of an improbable openness.

It is also a story about light. The light of heavenly bodies or the light derived from the encounter of the cultural experience of the viewer with the deeply personal experience of the artist. It is as if a person growing up suddenly realizes that his first love and his first success, hid dreams and bitter disappointments are not at all unique and that it is wonderful.

Elizaveta Plavinskaya

* Book by a French astronomer Camille Flammarion «Astronomie Populaire» (Popular Astronomy), published in 1879.

Alexandra Paperno was born in Moscow and studied art in New York at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where she received her degree in fine arts in 2000. In 2004 her first solo exhibition was held at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), Moscow. Her exhibition «Star Maps» was presented at Stella Art Gallery, Moscow, in 2006. Alexandra Paperno has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including Moscow International Forums of Art Initiatives, Prague Biennale of Contemporary Art, etc.