Two years ago Alexander Iskin staged a performance destroying his computer and smartphone. He then disappeared from the social media and worked in Havana and Mexico City. After an exhibition in Los Angeles, he moved to a remote castle to prepare his new exhibition. Following the artist’s terminology, he created interrealistic landscape paintings. By means of a rotating mechanism, they can be rotated by ninety degrees, resulting in an absence of fixed upper, lower, right, or left sides. Thus the viewer has influence on the formal aspect of the painting as well as on its content. In addition to the landscape on the lower reaches of the Saale River, the books The Overview Effect by Frank White and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce provided inspiration for the works.

Alexander Iskin: “Through Frank White I have understood how small the earth is and that borders, cultures and opinions are only set concepts with a facilitating function. The earth’s rotation fascinates me: On the one hand the repetitive, but also the continuously new. Just think of the constantly changing cloud formations. I tried to translate that into painting. This also gave me the idea for the rotation pictures. The rotation changes content and perspective, and also leads to the avoidance of clichés. The title of the exhibition comes from Finnegan’s Wake and is a sequence of the word thunder in ten extinct languages. The earth, our world, is in upheaval. And thunder is a version of this – a radical change, an upheaval.”

What does interrealism mean to Iskin and how relevant is this upheaval to him? Today we live in two realities; a physical and a virtual one. Interrealism proclaimed by Iskin examines the space in between. The upheaval is brought about by the new superimposed second reality. The in-between, the inter-reality, is the birthplace of Iskin’s works and the object of reflection. The rotational images are not defined by top or bottom. Therefore, the viewer can choose his preferred pictorial reality. In order to ensure this absence of hierarchy, Iskin paints the pictures from all sides. In this lies a cinematic element: the interdependency between paintings; a moving constellation through the rotation. Iskin is interested in the moment between the pictures.

The painting process goes hand in hand with aleatoric moments, with forms that emerge by chance and that cannot be imagined. In this respect, the pictures become actors. Everyone knows Picasso’s dictum, he doesn’t search, he finds. Iskin also lets himself be surprised by his pictures. As an observer one can feel this: each turn leads to new metamorphoses. It would be an exaggeration to say that the pictures painted themselves. But Iskin does not paint them alone; they emerge in an in-between, in interreality.

When Iskin speaks of radical change, one also thinks of the fractures of modernity in the context of art. A century ago, an abstract picture was first painted, atonal music was composed, the literary stream of consciousness was released – the figure was crushed, the tonality dissolved, the narrator killed. Revolutionary acts of liberation. Half a century later, postmodernism again dismantled modernism’s claim to totality.

But where does interrealism stand? Iskin sees a danger in the virtual world because it threatens to become overpowering and create new hierarchies. For his critique of this new world, he makes use of the classical medium of painting. His paintings do not deny their origin, the experiences of modernism, expressionism and cubism. One can feel the influence of the colourfulness of Otto Müller or Schmidt-Rottluff. Despite this tradition, Iskin does not pose as the great narrator. This has something postmodern about it. But he does not deconstruct either. Rather, he searches for a new harmony between realities, broken only by a wink and his barely suppressed play instinct. Thus, in the spirit of Lyotard, there is no great narrative. But Iskin strives for a harmonious interplay of different perspectives, fragments and realities. His interrealism and painting have something profoundly constructive, positive, human and – importantly – humorous about them. Enlightenment, not as a dangerous dialectic; postmodernism, not as disparity, but interrealism as a romantic, playful devotion to the plurality of worlds. In a sense, one could call his painting transmodern; an investigation of the in-between. Iskin’s movement: With a smile from tradition through modernity into interreality. After his exhibition in Los Angeles and a winter at Schloss Beesenstedt, Iskin is ready for the next upheaval. He will disappear for some time. Between the worlds. Inter-reality.