Mikhail Alekseev

Timeless Tuscany

The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents the exhibition ‘Timeless Tuscany’, showcasing the work of Mikhail Alekseev. Tuscany is heaven on earth, as those who have made even one visit are well aware, while those as yet unacquainted with Mikhail Alekseev’s photographs can look forward to the experience. Tuscany is a place where real life is perceived with a special piquancy. The surrounding space is so perfect and harmonious that the world beyond this Italian region might have ceased to exist. All that matters is what happens here, and now.

Tuscany’s perfection feels timeless. The character of Tuscany comes from several indivisible elements. Vineyards that formed the Tuscan landscape; architecture that dissolves into this landscape and thereby complements it; the traditional Tuscan festivals — historic football competitions in Florence and the spectacular Palio horse races in Siena, famous worldwide and evoking the same emotions today as in times past.

Together these aspects emit the aura that makes Tuscany unique. The concept is hard to express just because it is all-pervasive. And this is the task Mikhail Alekseev handles with such mastery. In the ‘Timeless Tuscany’ project he manages to visualise Tuscan mythologems and produce historical epicism in the fleeting and momentary, in the experience of ‘here and now’.

For each of his subjects, be it the legendary Tuscan wine making, an architectural fragment with traditional marble facing or costumed tournaments in the town streets, the artist has found his own approach, a particular manner for shooting and processing the image. He tries not only to capture the ‘passing moment’, but also to compose an integral pictorial composition in which space is organised by lines, rhythms, dapples and textures. The skill of seeing and conveying contrast in textures and emotional states is the obvious merit of these shoots created with such passion and such a fine sense of artistic direction.

‘Timeless Tuscany’ features black and white photographs that accumulate photographic experience of the mid-19th century and the latest achievements of sports photo reportage; compositional methods from the Italian Renaissance encounter early 20th-century modernism. Alekseev’s black and white minimalism has imbibed the endless variety of Tuscan colour and light, as if absorbing Tuscan red wine matured for decades.

The photographer would like to think Anatoly Korneev and the Simple Company for their help and support in realising this project.