Kaikhan Salakhov, The Cosmic Renaissance: an architect who lost the site

ALSERKAL AVENUE · DUBAI

Reading time: 10 min

Thirty six canvases of hand-drawn geometry, each standing for a problem a spacefaring civilisation will have to solve. The most useful way to look at them is not as paintings about the cosmos. It is as drawings by a trained architect who no longer has a building to draw.

---

Astral Space Exploration: The Cosmic Renaissance, at Firetti Contemporary on Alserkal Avenue from 18 September to 18 November 2024, was a solo exhibition by Kaikhan Salakhov consisting of thirty six acrylic canvases, every one of them drawn by hand. The gallery’s programme traces back to Praxis of Change, the ten-artist group show that ran through Dubai Design Week 2021, not long after Firetti Contemporary first opened at Alserkal Avenue.

The framework is ambitious and unusually wide-ranging. Salakhov, born in 1993, trained as an architect and then founded Astral Space Exploration, under which he has developed what he calls the ASX-Grid, a model of physical and spiritual progression for cosmic civilisations across eight stages, from Pre-Planetary to Universal. Each of the thirty six paintings takes one concept from that system, covering architecture, robotics, economics, governance, artificial intelligence, environmental limits and philosophy, and expresses it in geometry rather than in words. Each carries a description that poses a question rather than supplying an answer.

There is a version of this exhibition that reads as a complete private cosmology given gallery walls, and plenty of visitors will have seen it that way.

There is a more productive version, and it starts with the architecture training, because these are not paintings that happen to be geometric. They are drawings made according to a particular professional convention, and once you recognise the convention the whole show comes into focus.

These are construction drawings, not pictures

Look at what the canvases do not have.

They have no light source. Nothing casts a shadow, nothing is modelled, no form turns away from an illumination. They have no perspective, no vanishing point, no depth cue that would place a viewer at a particular station point in front of a particular thing. They are symmetrical, or built on a stated symmetry that is then broken deliberately. Their curves are compass curves and their lines are straightedge lines, arrived at by construction rather than by eye.

That is not the description of a painting. It is the description of an orthographic drawing: the plan, section and elevation convention by which architects and engineers describe things. Orthographic drawing removes the viewer on purpose. It refuses foreshortening so that every dimension on the sheet is a true dimension, and it discards light so that nothing about the object is obscured by the accident of where the sun happens to be. It is a drawing type designed to be measured from, not looked at.

Salakhov trained in architecture and, by his own account, left it because the technology available could not build what he wanted to build. What he did not leave was the drawing convention. Every one of these canvases is made in the language of the plan, applied to a subject that has no site, no client, no brief and no gravity.

That reframing does something useful for the work. As paintings about the cosmos they sit alongside a large body of mystical abstraction. As construction drawings for civilisations that do not exist yet, they belong to a much more interesting and much smaller tradition, the one that runs through the visionary architectural drawing of Boullée, through Archigram, through every unbuildable project drawn with total technical seriousness precisely because building it was never the point.

He built a notation, and a notation has to be tested

The show’s real proposition is a language. Thirty six concepts, thirty six canvases, a consistent geometric vocabulary intended to say things that words are not efficient at saying.

That is symbol design, and it has an established test. A notation system succeeds when a trained reader can extract the meaning from the marks without the key. Musical notation passes. Circuit diagrams pass. Ordnance Survey conventions pass. The test is not whether the symbols are beautiful; it is whether the information survives the translation into form and comes back out again at the other end.

By that test, this system is still young, and the exhibition itself supplies the evidence of how it is being built. Every canvas comes with a written description. The geometry and the text are designed to work together, and Salakhov keeps both, so that the paintings hold ideas which are also held in language and each side carries part of the load.

That is the stage every notation passes through, and it is worth saying plainly. Almost every notation in use took generations and many hands to stabilise, and a system produced by one person over roughly a decade is at the point where it is ready for other readers. What would show the ASX-Grid at full strength is not another exhibition. It is somebody other than Salakhov using it and arriving at the intended meaning.

There is one point in his favour worth drawing out. The descriptions pose questions rather than statements, which is a different relationship between text and image from the usual explanatory caption. A caption that answers closes the work. A caption that asks leaves the geometry to do the arguing. It is a better solution than a wall label, and it is the right one for this work.

Doing it by hand is the argument

Every mark in this exhibition was made by hand, and that is the decision most worth defending.

Nothing on these canvases is beyond a parametric modeller. Rotational symmetry, subdivided polygons, nested circles, recursive grids: a competent user of Grasshopper or Processing could generate the entire visual family in an afternoon, output it at any resolution, and print it flawlessly. The geometry itself carries no evidence of difficulty. It is exactly the kind of form that computation makes cheap.

Which is what makes the hand-drawing a position rather than a preference. What the hand adds is not accuracy, because a compass is less accurate than an algorithm. It adds duration and consequence. A generated line costs nothing and can be undone; a drawn line costs minutes and cannot. The pressure varies, the pigment loads unevenly, the closing of a circle rarely meets its start exactly, and the thirty sixth canvas is made by a person who has drawn thirty five of them.

For a body of work about civilisations that get their futures right or wrong depending on whether they take responsibility for irreversible decisions, choosing an irreversible medium is more than a stylistic note. It is the argument, made in the method rather than in the caption. Whether Salakhov intended that reading or not, it is the strongest thing in the room.

The ASX-Grid is a taxonomy, and taxonomies are design objects

Eight stages, from Pre-Planetary to Universal, is a classification system, and classification systems are worth examining as designed things rather than as neutral descriptions.

The obvious point of comparison is the Kardashev scale, proposed by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, which sorts civilisations into three types by the amount of energy they can harness: a planet’s worth, a star’s worth, a galaxy’s worth. Kardashev’s model has lasted sixty years for a specific reason, which is that it has exactly one variable and that variable is measurable in principle. It tells you almost nothing about a civilisation’s character, and that restraint is why it survives.

Salakhov’s grid does the opposite. It adds spiritual progression alongside physical capability, drawing openly on Ken Wilber and Sri Aurobindo, and it runs to eight stages rather than three. That gives it far more descriptive richness. Every stage model of anything, from human development to organisational maturity, rests on the same working premise: that the sequence is meaningful, that the stages are discrete, and that later is more developed. Salakhov builds on that premise openly, and the eight stages give him room to describe what three could not.

Naming that is not a dismissal. A taxonomy is a design object and it should be assessed like one: what does it make easy to think? This one makes it easy to think about technological and ethical development as a single joined problem, which is a genuine contribution and is precisely what the more famous scale sets aside. It keeps capability and wisdom inside the same frame, which is arguably the pairing most worth thinking about.

Two galleries, two opposite decisions about text

A footnote that turns out to be more than a footnote.

In the same season, a few units away on the same avenue, Mestaria hung Areej Rajab’s Interwoven with every work untitled and no captions at all, on the argument that a description standing in front of a painting decides what the viewer finds. Salakhov did the reverse, attaching a written question to each of thirty six canvases and treating the text as part of the work.

Both are defensible and both do real work. Strip the text and the visitor meets the painting directly. Supply it and the image and the words share the argument between them. What is interesting is that two Alserkal galleries within a few hundred metres of each other reached opposite conclusions in the same autumn about the single most consequential piece of exhibition design there is, which is how much language to put on a wall.

For Salakhov specifically, the balance is finer than for most, because his entire project is a claim that geometry can say things words cannot. Attaching a question to every canvas is, on its own terms, an invitation.

Where its strength lies

Two more things worth drawing out beyond the notation already described.

The first is the scale of the ambition. A single artist proposing a comprehensive model of civilisational development across physics, economics, governance, ethics and consciousness is making a very large claim, and the work carries it on its own terms, without leaning on the apparatus any of those fields would ordinarily supply. The show handles that with real skill, by posing questions instead of asserting answers, and the framing invites the viewer in rather than closing the subject down.

The second is visual range. Thirty six works in one consistent geometric idiom is a sustained piece of discipline, and that discipline is what makes the system read as one language across the room. The ones that hold hardest are the ones where the symmetry is broken for a reason. Where the geometry completes itself, the painting becomes a clear diagram of its own rules, and a rule-based system needs both modes to show what it can do.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

It would be easy to file this exhibition under cosmic mysticism and move on, given the vocabulary around it: sacred geometry, spiritual progression, cosmic consciousness. Those phrases cover a very wide field.

What is actually in the room is more disciplined than the language suggests. An architect who could not build what he wanted kept the profession’s drawing conventions and applied them to a subject with no site. He invented a notation and pairs it with its captions, which is how a new language earns its first readers. And he drew every line by hand at a moment when the machine would have done it faster, better and for nothing, on a body of work about the consequences of decisions that cannot be undone.

That last decision is the heart of it. Whatever the ASX-Grid grows into, thirty six irreversible surfaces made slowly by one person is a coherent thing to have done.