Green Book (1989)

Green Book. 1989. Book spread

The Green Book [Зеле́ная кни́га (Zelenaia kniga)] (1989), is the third artist's book in a series of four Alexey Parygin author’s editions. The series Pesok (The Sand), Tsvetnye zvuki (The Coloured Sounds), Zelenaia kniga (The Green Book), Moia mansarda (My Attic) was created in 1989-1990 at the Nevsky-25 squat workshop (Leningrad) on the basis of the artist’s own poetic texts, the free-verse poems of 1987-1989. All books have similar format, stylistic unity of design, and are of limited edition.

Quotes

• ...important direction in contemporary Russian artists’ books, following precedents set by the Futurists, is the fusion of poetic and artistic talent in artist-authors blessed with Doppelbegabung. <...> An artist who achieved equal mastery in more than one medium and combined an expertise in different arts is Parygin. His poetic collections Pesok (Sand, 1989), Zelenaia kniga (The Green Book, 1989), Tsvetnye zvuki (Coloured Sounds, 1990) and Moia mansarda (My Attic, 1990) represent an attempt to synthesize text and plastic figuration in books where literary and visual languages are calculated to have a simultaneous effect on the reader/viewer.
  • Elena Grigoryants Absorbing the Futurist heritage: Vasily Vlasov and Alexey Parygin / The Futurist Tradition in Contemporary Russian Artists’ Books // International Yearbook of Futurism Studies / Special Issue on Russian Futurism. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. — Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Vol. 9 — 2019. — P. 280.

• Each illustration is protected by an interleaf made of blush tracing paper, an old book tradition often used in the livre d’artiste. This creates the peculiar effect of a curtain, behind which we can discern, as if in a haze, the full-page illustrations printed in a brownish ink on cream-tinted watercolour paper <...> The frontispiece shows the silhouettes of the Singer Company Building on Nevsky Prospect in Saint Petersburg, where Dom Knigi (“House of the Book”) is located, and the Kazan Cathedral. Above them float the artist’s moving eye.
  • Elena Grigoryants Absorbing the Futurist heritage: Vasily Vlasov and Alexey Parygin / The Futurist Tradition in Contemporary Russian Artists’ Books // International Yearbook of Futurism Studies / Special Issue on Russian Futurism. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. — Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Vol. 9 — 2019. — P. 280.