Alexei Gordini Pop-Up exhibition “Second hand paintings”

In his novel “Death of Author”, written in 1967, Roland Barthes claims that we need to separate author´s personal experience from the actual art he is doing. Reader or viewer do not need any person of author to interpret the piece, rather able to understand it relating only to their own experience.
The quality of the work does not play a big role, because in the field of contemporary art not medium but the person of the artist costs. In that sense contemporary art is fighting the “death of author” because often the person of the artist is much more important than what he is doing. To understand the meaning of a contemporary art piece you need to know the context including artist`s biography and some personal information. Presence of the works in “white cube” and elite feeling about it fights the global media stream which can be described as an intellectual content without author.

Being an art selling artist myself I am thinking a lot about meaning of the author in market based relationships. Paintings I have noticed in second hand stores where innocent in the sense of authorship, just pure visual material. As a viewer I didn’t have any other possibility beside of imagining stories behind them.
With the given project two layers are displayed. One is anonymity and author`s nonexistence. The second one is author`s brutal vandalizing invasion. Author`s resurrection after his death. Second hand paintings, painted over with critical notes from artist´s personal experience are becoming some kind of Scrhödingers cat. Being anonymous they are impregnated with certain artist thought at the same time. Being outsiders of the art world, they became contemporary art pieces, because the person of contemporary artist had retouched them.