白桦

Birch bark never repeats, like a fingerprint: the black strokes on white are different on every tree. Paper, shoes and vessels were made from it, and letters were written on it in Novgorod three hundred years before paper. The birch is the tree that stands in the Russian landscape in the place of a person: alone, white, vertical.

The series gathers those verticals into a rhythm. A painted grove — trunks on gold, light between them. Bark in stripes — the surface in close-up, stroke by stroke. A blue chequerboard and a grid of bark fragments — the birch taken apart into modules. A red square laid over the trunks is the sign that this is no longer a landscape but a composition: Malevich has walked through the grove and left a mark.

Relief on artboard — the bark modelled to its texture, the strokes incised; white and black pigments; leaf gold on the ground; epoxy resin, in which white becomes as deep as snow in sunlight. The edition is numbered.

A series for a bedroom, a living room, a country house, for white and light interiors. Birches is the studio's calmest work: the verticals hold the wall without demanding attention.