The exhibition Entropy by Maks Shevchenko was presented at Espacio Art Gallery, London, 13-15 December in 2025
From Coloured Dots to the Atomic Bomb
The dot in the language of modernist art has a deep and rich tradition. Pointillism, a movement of the second half of the nineteenth century emerging from Impressionism, became a symbol of progress at a time when the Second Industrial Revolution was transforming human mentality. The first exhibition at which Georges Seurat showed Parisians Bathers at Asnières (1884) took place only five years after the invention of the light bulb and eight years after the invention of the telephone. Once again, the world seemed comprehensible to humanity, measurable and susceptible to rationalisation. The result of this atmosphere can be seen in the paintings of the Neo-Impressionists, who — unlike the Impressionists — used dots to express objectivity, reason and reflection rather than impression and emotion.
It is worth noting that dots anticipated the structural, atomistic nature of matter, which would only be confirmed in the twentieth century by Einstein, although the Pointillists based their practice on then groundbreaking theories related to perception — for example, the theory of Michel Eugène Chevreul, according to which colours are relative. When blue is placed next to white, it appears different from when it is placed beside red. Consequently, the perception of a single colour in a multicoloured painting cannot be objective or reliable. Distance is also significant — dots, much like today’s pixels on computer screens, could create a unified landscape when viewed from an appropriate distance. The Pointillists were interested in human perception and in how colour might function beyond it — objectively.
Connecting the Dots
Maks Shevchenko, in his last solo exhibition in London (Espacio Art Gallery) consciously refers to the language of art and the symbolism of punctuation. In Pointillism, the world was statistical and calculable; after the invention of the atomic bomb, the dot was replaced by the stain (ejaculation) — the wet dream of catastrophists preserved on the canvases of Jackson Pollock. In the twenty-first century, In series ‘Entropy’ Maks Shevchenko presents modernist entropy — the decline of an idea in which seemingly eternal laws cease to function. From the white walls of the gallery, the artist directs us toward the sphere of social engineering — organised according to the primacy of law, according to an order which, with each successive crisis, loses its legislative authority in favour of anarchic freedom.
Like Pollock, the artist titles his works with numbers, consciously referring to the post-digital character of contemporary times. Numbers are so omnipresent that they have become transparent; we have grown accustomed to their supposed infallibility, and Shevchenko plays with this common phantasm. The mandala, ouroboros and dharma — all of these religious symbols refer to perfection, the cycle of reincarnation and the rhythms of the cosmos. In the Entropy series, Shevchenko uses the symbolism of the circle in order to alter its meaning. For this artist, geometric circles become self-sabotaging Ford production lines, spheres and stains of oily blood within the biotechnological tissue of the city (after all, a sniper also operates with a dot in a crosshair), ink blots in Gutenberg’s printing press, and sometimes an enraged swarm of bees (the French pointiller means to quarrel over trifles).
To Dot the I’s
Pointillism celebrated the Enlightenment mind, whose rational ideals decades later revealed darker consequences: meticulously organised concentration camps, colonial expansion, and the atomic bomb. After it was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, art could no longer be created in the same way. At that time, Pollock began working on action painting, which allowed Americans to therapeutically process visions of bodies splattering against the walls of Japanese cities. Maks Shevchenko places a full stop in this history by proposing a series of paintings immersed in a highly technologised, post-industrial world. Entropy reveals the flaws of the production algorithm, proposing imperfection as an aesthetic value and familiarising us with errors so that they may finally appear natural.
