Registration of Everything. Metalanguage 1980

Oleksandr Aksinin made this ink drawing, ‘Registration of Everything. Metalanguage’ sometime before 1985. It’s like he’s charting a whole world of invented symbols, each one meticulously rendered in its own little square. I wonder what it was like for him to sit and draw each tiny element, lost in this world of his own making. The pink really pops, doesn’t it? It almost feels like a secret language or code, where each shape and colour holds a specific meaning that only Aksinin truly understood. I love the little cluster of nails, and the strange floating figures. The textures he creates with simple lines are so captivating. You can sense his hand moving across the page. It reminds me of Hilma af Klint’s abstract paintings – both artists trying to capture something beyond the visible world through symbols and abstraction. There's a conversation happening across time and space between artists, each one building on the ideas of those who came before. Painting is like that, an ongoing experiment with seeing and thinking.