Sergei Tchoban: Dreams of Frozen Music

The last days to see the exhibition Dreams of Frozen Music at the Tokyo Art Museum by the architect and architectural draftsman Sergei Tchoban.

The museum presents 30 drawings that are not meant to be “the typical drafts´for architectural projects. No building is ever being built according to them; they rather can be seen as ‘free architectural fantasies.’” Tchoban’s aesthetic approach, his visual language and his artistic means seem not to be contemporary but rather timeless. Classical orders of columns, domes of baroque churches and pre-modernist architecture are being blended into surreal vedutas. Technically brilliant Tchoban employs all kind of materials including ink, water color, red chalk, charcoal and pastel chalk.

In his works the notion of the classical capriccio seems to be revisited, the fantastic and playful transgression of genres and art historical classifications is at work. The classicist esthetics of ruins and quotations from revolutionary Soviet architecture, monuments of gigantic Lenin head sand flooded buildings form a deeply mesmerizing landscape. The world which the artist depicts, seems out of joint, their fundaments defy to the final collapse. Modernism and postmodernism has not yet taken place.

The exhibitions title Dreams of Frozen Music makes reference to a phrase the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling once used, and who thereby created a poetic image for architecture. Harmony and measurement, classical principles of music and architecture come to mind, but the notion of freezing seems to evoke a certain temperature: on the one hand there is cool rationality, a sharp observing eye, but also the romantic sense of beauty of decay mingle in those works.

Curated by: Jan-Philipp Frühsorge
Project Manager: Esenija Bannan