The Ethics of Proximity — Material Thinking in the Post-Visible Condition

In Nearness (Atticus Art Gallery,  3 September – 28 November), Valeriy Iakovlev reclaims sculpture as a site of philosophical resistance. Sustained through analogue materiality and an ethics of attention, his practice constructs a language of proximity — an art that thinks through touch, delay, and endurance. The works gathered under this title do not illustrate nearness; they enact it. Through their poised stillness and disciplined tactility, Iakovlev reimagines form as relation, proposing an intimacy that neither consumes nor resolves its object.

His sculptures — in bronze, aluminium, and cast composite — emerge from a slow choreography of contact. Modelling, casting, polishing: each stage is both material and metaphysical, a negotiation between force and surrender. The surfaces gleam with restraint, concealing a history of friction. What appears seamless is, in truth, a sediment of labour — the accumulation of minute adjustments, repetitions, and erasures. For Iakovlev, technique becomes meditation. To polish is to translate time into surface, to convert patience into light. The perfection of finish is not technological but ethical — a discipline of care that preserves the dignity of matter.

In an era defined by virtual acceleration, this devotion to touch acquires critical urgency. Iakovlev’s practice belongs to what might be called the post-visible condition: a moment when images exceed attention, when everything can be seen but little is truly perceived. Against this saturation, his sculptures assert opacity as a virtue. They are not designed for the glance; they demand duration. The viewer must adjust to the tempo of matter itself — must learn to see as one would listen. Each work transforms looking into an act of proximity, where perception becomes a form of responsibility.

The forms themselves — continuous, biomorphic, quietly animate — oscillate between abstraction and empathy. They evoke organic processes without representing them: swelling, branching, enclosing. This morphology is neither geometric nor figurative but rhythmic, embodying the breath of becoming. In their subtle asymmetries and tender volumes, Iakovlev discovers an anatomy of relation — bodies without organs, boundaries without borders. These are not symbols of life but participants in its unfolding. The sculptural form becomes a state of being: simultaneously complete and in transition.

Here, the ethical dimension of Nearness comes into focus. To work by proximity is to approach without domination, to remain near without possession. The artist’s hand persuades rather than imposes; form arises through dialogue with resistance. Such an approach recalls Levinas’s vision of the encounter with the Other — the face not as representation but as command. Each of Iakovlev’s surfaces carries this trace of alterity: a refusal to be exhausted by visibility, a quiet insistence on difference. His sculptures do not invite comprehension; they invite care.

Materiality, here, is not passive substance but co-author. Bronze is chosen not for its permanence but for its capacity to remember — it holds the ghost of every touch, every hesitation. The transition from clay to cast is not a loss but a transformation, an allegory of endurance. The work continues to live precisely because it resists closure. Even the most polished surface vibrates with incompletion, the remnant pulse of becoming. The object, rather than representing time, embodies it — solid yet trembling, still yet porous.

If modernist abstraction sought purity, Iakovlev seeks permeability. His smooth surfaces, far from idealising form, render it vulnerable. Light slides across them as if uncertain of its task; reflections blur, diffuse, dissolve. This is sculpture as tenderness, not as spectacle. The works recall the modernist lineage of Brâncuși, Hepworth, and Arp — yet they do so to test its limits. Where the moderns aspired to transcendence, Iakovlev bends towards immanence. His spirituality is not vertical but horizontal, sustained in the friction between the human and the material. It is an art that breathes at the level of the skin.

This focus on surface — as organ rather than ornament — marks Iakovlev’s most profound philosophical gesture. The surface is where matter feels itself, where the world becomes sentient. Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of being-in-contactresonates here: existence as continuous touch, an endless negotiation between interior and exterior. In Iakovlev’s bronzes, the surface mediates this dialogue. It is at once a limit and a threshold, a site where visibility is constantly redefined by its own withdrawal.

The politics of such restraint are unmistakable. In refusing spectacle, Iakovlev resists the violence of exposure that defines contemporary visuality. His sculptures are opaque not to withhold meaning but to protect it from exhaustion. They model a different temporality of seeing — slow, reverent, and reciprocal. To look becomes an ethical act: a form of attention that restores dignity to both object and observer. Through this, Nearness aligns itself with a lineage of affective minimalism — Agnes Martin, Roni Horn, On Kawara — yet distinguishes itself through its corporeal empathy, its insistence that thought must remain tangible.

The formal tension between weight and levity, density and breath, animates Iakovlev’s material thinking. His bronzes appear at once grounded and suspended, as if resisting the gravity that defines them. Their stillness is not inert but vibrational — a slow oscillation between presence and disappearance. In this oscillation lies the artist’s metaphysical orientation: form as duration, matter as thought. Each sculpture unfolds as an experiment in equilibrium, where fragility sustains coherence.

Within this ethic, fragility assumes a central role. It is not a sign of weakness but of attentiveness — the recognition that endurance depends upon vulnerability. Iakovlev’s work transforms fragility into structure, integrating the potential for collapse into the very logic of stability. His forms seem always at risk, on the verge of dissolving into air. Yet this precariousness grants them vitality. They endure by yielding, persist by softening.

In the context of the post-visible, such fragility becomes radical. It acts as a counter-technology: an analogue ethics that resists the quantification of perception. Iakovlev’s slow, manual process offers a model of resistance through patience. His sculptures teach a new grammar of attention — one grounded in silence, repetition, and care. They suggest that the act of seeing might still contain the possibility of tenderness.

Nearness is not an exhibition about sculpture; it is sculpture as thought. Each work articulates a meditation on relation — between hand and matter, perception and time, self and world. The viewer is drawn into a field of quiet reciprocity where boundaries blur and the material begins to think back. The exhibition’s title reveals its philosophical ambition: nearness not as proximity in space, but as the condition of ethical being.

In Iakovlev’s hands, bronze becomes consciousness, surface becomes duration, and silence becomes form. Against acceleration, he offers patience; against spectacle, care; against the exhaustion of vision, the gentle persistence of touch. His ongoing work reminds us that to be near is not to possess but to attend — to remain open to what withdraws, to hold stillness without freezing it. Nearness stands as a living treatise on perception in the twenty-first century: the recovery of slowness as a mode of thought, and of form as the last language of intimacy.

Exhibition dates: 3 September – 28 November 2021

Organised with: Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre

Atticus Art Gallery (11a Queen Street, BA1 1HE, Bath)

Further details are available at atticusgallery.co.uk.

 Tom Denman, residing in London, is a distinguished freelance art critic whose perceptive articles have featured in eminent publications such as Art Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtReview, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, e-flux, Flash Art, Ocula, and Studio International. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading, focusing his research on Caravaggio and the noble-intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Naples. Presently, his critiques primarily explore the subtleties and emerging trends within contemporary art.