Contemporaneity is always a construct build from fragments of the past. It’s easily to imagine the past through historical objects and style of the epoch, but the present has no image.

Vadim Leukhin depicts the fruit of the collective imaginary. His project “The City of Childhood”, presented at the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, is a reflection on the social changes that have occurred to Russia over the past decades. It analyzes such concepts of the past, as “high ideals”, “childhood”, and “dialogue of generations”.

Individualism and separateness of contemporaneity result in melancholy and longing of the future. Because the past originates our present and even future. Social problems and ideological crisis are expressed in the project “The City of Childhood” through special arranging of space in paintings and objects.

The artist’s methods and techniques create original constructive and symbolic spaces. Leukhin’s works are multilayered: using the technique of collage he fixes the visual perception of life. His characters dissolve and re-emerge from the color patches just as if they would vanish and disappear in the sea of modernity. At the same time every now and then the uncolored surface of canvas shows the breakthrough of space.

The art objects by Vadim Leukhin present the space outside painting and return to original forms and signs of time.