In
1991 I started to work on paper, moving from black line drawing
to scarificated and stubbed surface. The exhibition Between
the Borders at Toyota Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art and
Honen-in Temple, Kyoto, was in a way finalising a long period
of work with paper during which the main approaches to the surface
were developed. At this stage works on paper were taken to the
extreme.
"...Ivanov's Untitled work is a series of battered, washed
and folded papers, scarred by rows of indentations and methodic
scratchings. They seem, like some kind of itinerent, exhausted
by persistent travels,and transformed from their original context.
Distance
on the work reveals the shapes of fields, fencing, rows of
trees as seen from above, it appears as nature re-ordered
by human hand. The land is viewed from a distanced, birds
eye perspective, revealing roads and clearings, human needs
imposed on the 'natural' space. Ivanov, abstractly, reveals
society's incremental advance on the land, the beginning of
human shapes. His focus is on the texture of these developments,
on the architectural shapes, on the boundary markers that
separate distinct territories, on the influence of historic
migrations, many of which are pre-colonial, They re-connect
with a story of global trade, transit, cultural interdependency
that pre-dates the modern age, offering, again, a broader
historical perspective on global interconnectivity.
Ivanov's
landscapes reflect a perspective on the idea of the 'natural'
and the 'constructed" that runs through much of the work
in this collection. Importantly, distinctions between natural
and architectural are blurred and abstracted. The human and
the natural are seen as distinctions subject to re-evaluation,
definitions that exist within and of one another. The structures
that support these definitions are not equal to these different
perspectives, these new ways of seeing. ""
(
Juliette Brown, Between Borders: Works by British Artists
Born Elsewhere. Terra Incognita, London 2000, ISBN: 0 9535045
1 4 )
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