Colored Sounds

The Colored Sounds [Цветны́е зву́ки (Tsvetnye zvuki)] (1989), is the second 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.

Colored Sounds. 1989. Book spread

Quotes

• A sheet of graphic ‘sounds’ alternates with a poem printed on recto (the sheets’ versos remain blank). The visual elements work as an independent ‘text’ that prompts certain analogies between colour and sound, with which the early twentieth-century avant-garde also experimented, not only in painting, but also in music. Thus, colour is not only a decorative element but it also provides the main ‘sound’ of the book and adds different layers of meaning.
  • 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. 281