" Alexei Andreev's Stones Animate
An ordinary stone in his hands transforms into magical artifacts that look like animals or people. Stone by nature is cold, impassive, and eternal. From this cold eternity the carver, like a demiurge, extracts an essence that no one has ever seen before. The impassive stone suddenly finds another life, like Golem, once created.
A stone that the artist picked up in a field or on a riverbank becomes not just a talisman but an animated creature with a life of its own.
The artist can see a simple gray stone as a strange hedgehog resembling an Indian totem. And the other can turn it into a feathered creature, a plastic chimera, perfect in its stone nature. Perhaps that is how our distant ancestors saw the unconcerned and impassive messengers of heaven.
In the works of Alexei Andreev, it is possible to guess the plasticity of tropical Africa, ancient China, or the motifs of Melanesian masks. The symbolic, prehistoric expressiveness arises from the unity of the natural form of stones with the skill of their processing. Few people have the talent and patience to carve this material and endow it with magical features. Hard basalt or granite, which the author uses, requires a special attitude, determination, and strength.
The author's works are distinguished by special integrity. Andreev does not try to hide the natural physical properties of the material. Like his predecessors on all continents, he chose rough stone with a rough surface - which was at hand, which anyone could see. But only the artist found his fantastic characters in it. Their compositions are incredibly simple, which is admirable. Looking closely at these small sculptures, we can see the irony and warmth of the author, his sympathy for the little demons. Sympathy, perhaps, superstitious: the master feels himself a co-author of the inhuman forces of nature that have been from the beginning of time.
This is how superstitious people once felt about the Golem, whose creation implies a repetition of God's creation process. A being made like a human being, but without a soul: something, while imperfect, but already concealing in itself the germ of life. The life that the master creates, releasing it from the unconcerned stone.
As Alexey Andreev does. "
