Leonid Petrushin’s “Geometrical Phonetics” develops the artist’s main theme as presented in his big series of graphic triptychs “Kinetic Objects”. The idea was inspired by one of the properties of the Russian language – a big number of three-letter words. Later the artist began to utilize three-letter words from French, German and English as well. In fact he has been creating a new plastic language consisting of letters used as construction modules of strictly geometrical shapes. Each letter and each background (white and black, respectively) is shaped as a square, rectangle and triangle; laid over one another, they sometimes form more complex figures.
The creation of a new plastic language is not something unheard-of in the history of art: the examples include Wassily Kandinsky’s language of lyrical abstraction, Kazimir Malevich’s and Pier Mondrian’s language of geometrical abstraction, Victor Vasarely’s "plastic units". As the letters of an alphabet arrange themselves into words and the words arrange themselves into phrases, the modules of languages in painting and graphics arrange themselves into works of visual art.
Petrushin’s language of “geometrical phonetics” is undoubtedly a creative discovery or, if you wish, the artist’s invention. A letter, which is the graphic sign representing a sound, is transformed by the artist into a geometrical sign and, so, into a new universal plastic unit. The combinations of geometrically shaped letters and backgrounds, their visual movement as the viewer reads specific words on such tapes and planes account for the second word in the name of this new visual language in the series: phonetics.
Three letters cum signs with a background make up a triptych; the triptychs arrange themselves into tapes, the tapes fill in the planes which can grow without limit. Being universal, the language of geometrical phonetics can metamorphose non-stop co-opting words and letters from different languages. Because the tapes and planes can grow in size, because they can be used to construct geometrical shapes in space such as pillars round, triangular, quadrangular and multiangular in section, and because already existing objects can be enwrapped in or coated with them, these tapes and planes can be employed in industrial and non-industrial architectural design using modern technologies.
This sport for the brain which produced the new language of geometrical phonetics has a different sporting element, located at a different intellectual level. One level is that of geometry-plasticity-movement-space-architectonics. Another level is that of geometry-plasticity-movement-printing type-cipher code. Correlation of specific words as words per se and the same words used as modules for construction of objects on concrete planes or within concrete spaces introduces a special coded meaning and substance into the accomplished art object.