Universum "The Figure of the Author"

The 'Figure of the Author' Universum brings together Konstantin Chaykin's self‑portrait statements, where the master turns to his own image, assembled from the same elements as his Horological Archetypes. In the paintings of this part of the collection, the artist focuses on the process of the creative act. Chaykin constructs a model of his own consciousness, where he makes the workbench an altar and gears the tools of thought.

Unlike a classical self‑portrait, where the artist records his physical presence, Chaykin abandons portrait likeness in favour of metaphor. His face may be hidden, replaced by a mechanical mask, or dissolved into the architecture of the workshop. Here the author places himself inside his own universum, becoming the subject of the construction. At the heart of the Universum lies the scene of the Mad Tea Party. According to the book, at that moment, the Mad Hatter's watch stopped forever at six o'clock in the evening, and time itself became a separate, wilful character. Carroll's characters in Chaykin's work inhabit two dimensions at once: they remain instantly recognisable figures from the tale, while simultaneously becoming Horological Archetypes assembled, by the laws of mechanical anatomy, from the components of a watch movement. The culmination of the Universum is the ultra-complicated "White Rabbit" watch, in which the literary source and the discipline of watchmaking are fused into a single form; Chaykin depicted the process of its creation in the central artwork A Mad Horological Party, transforming the watchmaker's bench, per the principle of the workbench as a model of the universe, into the site where an entire mythological world comes into being.