The Pinocchio Library

Petr Belyi has been nominated for the Kandinsky Prize, the Russian equivalent of the Turner Prize. His wooden library, alongside other works by contemporary artists, is being shown in an exhibition at the Louise Blouin Foundation in London curated by Oleg Kulik. Belyi studied at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg and in the graphics department at Camberwell College in London, before returning to live and work in St Petersburg. Much of his work explores the legible and the illegible.


Belyi's library comprises several distressed wooden bookshelves, which might have been rescued from a ramshackle Russian estate. Old scraps of paper are peeling from their sides, and you might expect to see spiders scurrying back to cobwebs between the books, if a contemporary art space wasn't such an unlikely place to find a spider. Strung on scarcely-visible wires from the ceiling, the bookshelves are reminiscent of the ladders in Louise Bourgeois' etchings, which float, never touching the ground or permitting human ascent. But Pinocchio's shelves are less equivocal. In size and stolid construction they echo 1960s tower blocks, rather than the miniature, delicate creature I imagined Pinocchio to be. The rough-hewn planks representing reading matter seem at home within the wooden barack structure which the architect Boris Bernaskoni has created to transform this Western white cube into a more fitting environment for Russian art.


Olesya Turkina and Viktor Mazin write in the Kandinsky Prize catalogue:

The books from Pinocchio's library point to the form and material of a wooden log, they pass on that memory from which the hero was born. The library preserves the knowledge in which a real boy is conceived.

Imprisoned in the wooden books, Pinocchio represents inaccessible knowledge, the melancholy law of provenance. It's as if Pinocchio's father, with a knife in hand, never came, the father who would have carved, would have given him form, pulled him out of imprisonment. The book-log preserves the secret.

Shadow Drawing Workshop

Emily Brett and I brought a touch of the eighteenth century to modern art at the Louise Blouin Institute in West London last weekend in a children's workshop on shadow drawing.

Exploring the use of light, dark and reflection in the works exhibited in the current show 'Design High', curated by Natalie Kovacs, the children created a world of shadows using paper cut-outs, dextrous finger twisting and drawing.

"Magical," said a grandmother. "A real buzz."

"Very inspiring and empowering," said one parent. "I loved the fact the children created in a space where real art works were on display."

The workshop culminated in a race between the children and their shadows, based on Aesop's The Hare and the Tortoise, and a triumphant march around the gallery.

‘I wanted to show the world that art is everywhere’

There is no other colour that will give you the feeling of totality. … Of peace … Of excitement … I have seen things that were transformed into black that just took on greatness.

So said Louise Nevelson, arch-haunter of East Side skips. Nevelson transformed herself into a black-clad Manhattan artist and took on greatness, becoming one of the most brilliant Abstract Expressionist sculptors. Nevelson’s post-Cubist ‘paintings in space’ were inspired by Picasso's early guitar sculpture, using oddments to create imposing monoliths. Not all her work is black, but she had a notable taste for monochrome.

A retrospective of Nevelson’s work is being shown at the Louise Blouin Foundation. I was particularly impressed by the huge work End of Day Nightscape (1973) in which 27 typecases laid end to end are filled with an assortment of bobbins, brushes and junk.

I've planned a series of children’s art workshops based around the show, and last weekend I was presumptious enough to suggest that we could make our own Nevelson sculpture.


Like Nevelson, the children used materials which had been discarded, but they worked on a slightly smaller scale. They made frames from old showboxes and filled them with cylinders (loo rolls), squares (plant pots) and accordion structures made from folded cereal boxes. The results were dynamic (and messy), but no one expected the transformation that occurred when I got out my spray can. PVA splashes and colourful commercial graphics were obliterated in mysterious black and gold. Later, Mairead O’Rourke, the education officer, organised a show of work in the gallery.


‘The work that I do is not the matter and it isn’t the colour,’ Nevelson said. ‘It adds up to the in-between place, between the material I use and the manifestation afterwards; the dawns and the dusks, the places between the land and the sea. The place of in-between means that all of this that I use – and you can put a label on it like ‘black’ – is something I’m using to say something else.’