Through a narrow crack, like on an old blurry photo, an ancient forum is presented, which is about to crumble into ashes, like an archaeological discovery in contact with fresh air. The architect Davide Bossi and the art historian Alena Grigorash recall their impressions of the exhibition by Alexander and Sasha Brodsky, shown at the Fondazione Galleria Milano (18.03– 07.09.2024), especially for the DEL’ARTE Magazine.
Architecture “as idea as idea”
The exhibition “Piazza senza nome” (Nameless Square) at the Fondazione Galleria Milano is a product of the synergic work of the architect Alexander Brodsky (senior) and his son Sasha Brodsky, who is an engraver. It is a collaboration between two artists (father and son) with different backgrounds, as well as a game of connections and references between a constructed space and paper architectures. Different artworks, but with a common vision, not clear at the first glance, but that invites investigation.
Alexander Brodsky is a Soviet architect who in the 1980s became famous at competitions in Japan and Europe for his utopian drawings and dioramas , which his friend and colleague Yuri Avvakumov called “paper architecture.” This theme of architectural utopia of an absolutely conceptual nature was later developed by the author into the concept of “architecture of imagination.” Moreover, these rather are memories of poor Soviet life, in gray, unclear tones, which are intersected by admiring an abandoned water well or a village house in Tarkovsky’s films. This is such a village lyricism.
The father of the architect Alexander Brodsky, Savva, was an architect, sculptor, poet and graphic designer, so the vocation of Sasha Brodsky, who makes graphics in the third generation, is a family tradition.
A. Brodsky. Graphic. 2023 © Photo by Davide Bossi
It is typical for Alexander Brodsky to make etchings of architecture, often fantastic or historical, complementing it with a theatrical installation. Thus, both photography and graphics appear as a method of conceptual archiving of ideas. This fits perfectly with the inauguration following the modernization of the Fondazione Galleria Milano, where a joint art fund is now also represented.
The very method of viewing Brodsky’s works is particular. The author loves to play with proportions and often it’s like a memory, vague and a little romantic in its melancholy: one can peek through a window, as if we were looking at “beauty in the distance” through old binoculars.
In the white cube of the Gallery, a clay-made case stands out, as in a game of Chinese boxes. At first glance, it seems a simple and fragile parallelepiped made of “terra cruda” clay, a conceptual and informal artwork, which almost struggles to approach the small-format figurative drawings hanging on the walls.
This dilapidation of materials — unfired clay, paper, watercolors — refers to both poor art and vanitas vanitatis. Sometimes one gets the impression that Brodsky’s installations are more reminiscent of an “architectural bodegon” than a theatrical diorama.
A window into the lonely city
As a staged impression, one can get the fact that the Brodsky family has been selling their works in America for quite some time. And the drawings on the theme of historical urbanism in Italy seems to be perceived through the eyes of an American tourist. Of course, without immersion in European history, it feels a little alien, cold and lonely, as in Olivia Lang’s book “The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone”.
Only with a careful look it is possible to see small holes in the surface of the case which invite one to look and discover what is hidden inside: a large square of an ancient city, with columns and obelisks, the monumental forum of an ancient Eternal City. It is a Piranesian world, sublime ruins of a grandiose antiquity, of a golden age, which however are not submerged by nature, but follow the scenario of a metropolis, inhabited by a multitude of teeming lonely individuals. We feel Baudlairian solitude of an individual who is lost in the magnitude of a modern metropolis, but also the smallness of a man compared to the environment he has built over the centuries: an ancient city, yet also a contemporary one, where the individual, in constant relationship with the technology he carries with him, loses interactions with the world around him and withdraws into his own solitude.
A.&A. Brodsky. View of the diorama case © Photo by Davide Bossi
Once the large square hidden in the case is revealed, even the drawings on the walls take on a new meaning: there are other images of this ancient city that is at the same time a modern metropolis, views of the forum, gardens, a vegetable garden (or a cemetery?), a room with a transparent roof, with human figures which, even when they are in pairs or in groups, project their incommunicability, solitude, sometimes appearing ghostly. Ghosts of a lost past that come back to life among immense sublime ruins — or lonely people of today’s technological civilization?
The solitude and disorientation of the human figures make the installation claustrophobic. The spaces in which the figures are located are never open landscapes, but are always enclosed, although always open to the sky. A suburban vegetable garden enclosed by a fence, in turn surrounded by buildings, where the perspective is cut out by a closed gate and the silhouettes of dead trees.
A. Brodsky. Graphic. 2023 © Photo by Davide Bossi
A. Brodsky. Graphic. 2023 © Photo by Davide Bossi
A vegetable garden or cemetery at night, where a figure seems to rise from the damp earth, aided by a sculptural figure, surrounded by a brick wall, in turn surrounded by a row of houses. Another cemetery in the evening, surrounded by the shadow of a high wall and a building. A motorbike in another suburban plot, with a frame from which a fragment of pavement with inscriptions emerges, like an archaeological excavation , in a hot, desert environment, almost a city in Egypt or the Middle East, also surrounded by a wall, from which houses, a palace and a mausoleum emerge.
A. Brodsky. Graphic. 2023 © Photo by Davide Bossi
A. Brodsky. Graphic. 2023 © Photo by Davide Bossi
A bosquette of a baroque garden, with its sculptures, surrounded by high topiary hedges, in turn immersed in a narrow square between tall buildings. A closed room, without windows but with a glass roof (or is it an open pergola?) that allows us to glimpse the silhouettes of the buildings in the urban environment in which it is located, while an enclosed human figure is looking at the emergency exit on the back wall. Views of the forum, the same forum as the display case-diorama, with its obelisks, like a large open-air room surrounded by buildings. Enclosed spaces surrounded by walls, fences, trees and buildings sometimes have reminiscences of the hortus conclusus or the bosquette of baroque gardens with their sculptures and topiary art: places separated from the world outside which are not seen as places of leisure, but rather of isolation. An enclosed space reflects, in such an expressionist representation, the isolation of the souls. From this point of view, it has no importance whether the figures are the ghosts of the past returning in a world constructed on the ruins of an ancient city or contemporary men isolated by technology: in any case they are isolated, disoriented individuals.
A. Brodsky. Graphic. 2023 © Photo by Davide Bossi
A. Brodsky. Graphic. 2023 © Photo by Davide Bossi
The exhibition has been compared to an architectural matryoshkа. Spectators look through the windows at the installation, the gallery’s employees look at the audience, and passers-by look into the luxurious Milanese courtyard of the Foundation’s historic building, which is in itself a valuable monument of art and history. What is this — a joke about voyeurism (they pay the most for watching the watcher) or a conceptual joke in the context of the context? There is no definite answer, but there is a fascination with contemporary art, which right before our eyes becomes, as it were, a part of history, and then a dream, a vague dream that you barely remember as soon as you wake up. In this feeling of an elusive memory of things and images there is an enduring charm of the Brodsky family style.
