Mask 2

The mask as an artistic image carries its own long-standing tradition: it conceals the face while, at the same time, laying the character bare, turning a conventional form into a sign of the utmost expressiveness. Konstantin Chaykin finds an unexpected source for this tradition in the regulator, the component governing a watch's accuracy, whose fan-shaped plate already recalls, to any watchmaker's eye, a stylised face, long before this resemblance was ever treated as an artistic device. A slight shift of this component's index between the marks for "slow" and "fast" can alter the movement's daily rate by tens of seconds, and it is precisely this function, the one that determines the accuracy of the entire movement, that became the starting point for the image.

In 'Mask 2,' Konstantin Chaykin pushes this discovered resemblance to its limit: the regulator's fan-shaped plate becomes a stern, almost totemic face, while retaining the metallic texture of bronze against a warm ochre ground. Two toothed wheels set with pink ruby bearings serve as watchful eyes, and a blue wedge topped with a slotted screw reads as a nose, joining the precision of the regulator to the emotional register of the image. A row of small rivet-like screws along the brow traces an arc of inner tension, so that the mask hovers between calm and surprise, displaying a whole range of human states. The work extends the principle of mechanical anatomy, where a regulating component, responsible for the pace of a watch's rate, acquires a character.