‘Dormouse’ is a study for the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Universum, where Konstantin Chaykin reinterprets a character from Lewis Carroll's tale through the language of Horological Art.
The subject of Ahasuerus turns to the Christian legend of the eternal wanderer, whose very name became a byword for the idea of endless, unstoppable time.
I do not paint archetypes. I construct them, as one constructs a watch movement: through structure, mechanics, and the logic of time.
The hairspring, the finest component of a watch movement, often no thicker than a human hair, which is how it acquired its name as early as the seventeenth century, determines the frequency of the balance's oscillations, and therefore the accuracy of the entire movement: a negligible change in its length or shape can throw a watch off by minutes per day.
The artwork ‘A Mad Horological Party’ stands as a definitive example of an exceptionally rare genre, the allegorical self-portrait, a tradition descending from the self-portraits of Renaissance masters, who painted themselves amid the instruments of their craft as testimony to the union of skill and contemplation.
