Nikolay Panafidin
KINETIC OBJECTS
March 13-27, 2015

I tested harmony with mathematics
when versed in science well
I fell in bliss of the creative dream.
Alexander Pushkin. Mozart and Salieri (1832)

Nikolay Panafidin is a unique mechanical engineer who proves that creativity is in the origin of everything. There is nothing he could not design or make by his hands. Along with his profession in the creation of high-tech equipment for different industries, he also made an experimental sample of the coronary artery valve for the thesis of a cardiologist in the Regional Hospital, or work up the mobile properties for Slava Polunin's and Victor Plotnikov's theater performances, or make a glass carbon sixstring guitar with acoustic characteristics close to a Stradivarius.

But there is a field where the technical genius of Nikolay Panafidin goes directly into the territory of art: the creation of kinetic objects where mechanics and rationality of structures lose a purely practical sense and serve to implement artistic concepts. Magnetic levitation technology allows the Angel to float freely in space. In the object "Going" the complex balanced movement of a person walking in a circle refers to the idea of correlation of man and the Universe as well as to the proportionality of the body of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci. "Black Cube" interprets the famous art work of Kazimir Malevich, which is transformed into a 3D square in turn of the new time. Suspended in air and moving, so it seems, only due to cohesion to each other, the minimalistic elements of the "Spinball" remind one of the constructivist style. N. Panafidin's portfolio includes some mobiles with conceptual content. For example, there is "The Light Inertiaid" that visualizes the complex phenomenon of impulse transmission within inertial masses and gravitational fields. What we see in this object may be impossible in physical reality, but in the reality of art this analogy can exist. In the shape and movement of "Platon's Sphere," the author embodies the theory of the ancient doctrine of the musical-mathematical structure of the space / world and, at the same time, creates a portrait of a complexly structured, but infinitely harmonious man who is an artist in the broadest sense of the word, Nikolay Panafidin.

Svetlana Shlyapnikova