Glasses 1985

Oleksandr Aksinin made this little drawing, Glasses, sometime before 1985, with ink on paper. It looks like he carefully built up a dark indigo-blue background by making tiny little dots. I wonder what Aksinin was thinking about when he made this strange but beautiful piece? Two eye-like bulbs stare out at the viewer from the bottom, underneath, a deluge of falling pebbles and two striped columns. The more I look, the more the falling stones seem like tears. Aksinin worked a lot with etching and graphics, which are linear and precise, and often have a kind of surreal, dreamlike quality. This drawing is so much about building up tone with tiny marks, a bit like Seurat’s pointillism but with more idiosyncratic subject matter. You get a sense that the artist is creating a whole world from scratch, one dot at a time, and that this world is both orderly and totally strange. It feels like he's inviting you into his own personal mythology.