Since Nietzsche diagnosed one of the biggest existential crises in the humanity, we have witnessed no linear developments of philosophical and scientific theories in this field anymore, but the whole constellation of religious, anti-religious and synthetic doctrines, which offer polar ideas on a simple question: what the purpose of our existence is and if there such a thing as free will. Valentin Korzhov’s latest sculptural project Thus Spoke Heaven is a conceptual reflection of the ontological idea of creation of something out of nothing in an attempt to illustrate the transition of a human being from the Letzter Mensch to the Übermensch. The sculpture itself presents one half of a plastic matrix casted from a human body, silver-platted and speckled with the words, signs and symbols, where the missing, invisible part unfolds the fundamental theoretical concept of the project. We see the male and female casts resembling Pompeii human cavities, standing or kneeling in humbleness or even decapitated as if caught unexpectedly by death and facing their complete final essence in Sartrean terms. When the external shell is torn off, what is left inside if not that very meaning, ideas and controversies that differ a human being from organic life and make him belong to the universal mind. In this sense the soul in Korzhov’s sculpture is reflected in the invisible eidos, the missing part of the physical matter.
Within the aforementioned existential crisis and the loss of spiritual landmarks, Korzhov visually paraphrases the concept of Übermensch, or a child as mentioned in the Bible in the form of a text as the ultimate tension of the will, thought and feelings. Korzhov refers here to three fundamental sources in the history of the human thought considered as revelation, which produced a strong impact on his own views and oeuvre, i.e., Plato’s Timaeus, Bible and Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche. Korzhov has created his own numerical system consisting of well-known symbolical numbers 1,2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10,12 and 40 which serve the basis for a random number generator to pick up the words from all three texts to create a system of words. This significant vocabulary decorates the bodies of the sculptures and serves as the language of communication echoing the wisdom of recent centuries and coming out of the depths of antiquity.
This brings us to the last important attribute of the project – the writing as such and the symbols. Notably, the font in this sacred tattoo repletes with the variety of shape and size. Derived from the inscriptions in early-Christian catacombs, Roman graffiti, handwriting of Leonard Cohen and Kurt Cobain, mixed and scratched out with a different level of pressure, these brutal and sometimes fancy scars communicate the irrelevance of habitual concept of time. It is the eternal nature of truth being spoken that makes these words and symbols shine on a silver surface of something that means to symbolize the fragile mortal human body. In fact, this collective logos is that same thread that leads the tightrope walker towards the goal of a Übermensch.