... Space - with A.Konstantinov - does not predetermine the structuring of objects, but, on the contrary, is used as a medium and is being structured. It admits the principle of mutual attraction, sympathy, and compatibility. It is ready to receive structures, it yields to them sensitively, shaping itself according to their intrinsic models and offering in exchange its own order, its right to modeling and filling up. Being absolutely nondescript at birth ("mute" and "blind") A.Konstantinov's space reveals its content through the structures introduced to it - "meshes", "stripes". In that way space is sacralized, actualized in its powers of segmentation, it acquires a "voice" and a "look", it becomes audible and visible, that is comprehensible and organic as a living being, not as an empty receptacle. On that level it can be turned into a sign and a signal, it can accumulate and generate information. Moreover, Konstantinov's plastic structures blaze up in space a certain paradigm of their own, also their sequence or syntagma, that is a certain text. That "spatial text " has a meaning and is generated as a result of the imposition on an open, living space of a kind of network, mesh, texture - as matter in its "spatial" form.

... A.Konstantinov's conception of the world demonstrates the changing structure of consciousness towards discreteness, atomization, breakdown of a line into a multitude of points. Utopian thinking is changed in its sign, internal freedom is awakened. Modern society develops apparently from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from uniformity to variety, and the artist points to the tendency waiting on the threshold of the future, on which that future depends. Instead of determinism there comes a recognition of reality's discrete character, time is no longer perceived as a pure sequence, but as a moment, a point. That type of thinking leaves no ideological waste as it has no external aim, it is aimless because it is integral. It has one thing revealed in another, not following from another as in the link between cause and effect. Each phenomenon has a value and meaning onto itself, and with that, it is an image of other phenomena, not related as dominant-subordinate, but as coordinate and complement.

In A.Konstantinov's work we observe - in the phrase of R.Barth - "the death of the author" who becomes an eternal copier manifesting by that the genuine value of the process. It transpires that he does not project reality, but only imitates endlessly what was created before, and not for the first time in its turn. That thesis of R.Barth - "the death of the author" - has come to be the latest formula of minimalism in its latest phase. The essence being rendered by today's minimalist is nothing but a ready-made dictionary from which he endlessly draws his creations. Life is transformed in A.Konstantinov's art into a text, "it imitates a book, which , in turn, consists of signs, i.e. imitates something else that's forgotten, ad infinitum". Universalism becomes ecological, it gives up intellectual combinatorics and modeling of space-text and relies on a sudden revelation from the depths of humanity of its integral, indivisible ego.

V.Patsyukov.
From "The Dramaturgy of the Point and the Line". Straight and Inverted Perspective of Russian Minimalism. Lubov Popova 1924 - 1994 Aleksander Konstantinov. Feldkirch 1994