Interview in the issue

Comprehending infinity/h1>

At the beginning of 2026, the cultural landscape of Dubna was enriched with the first professional exhibition space - the JINR Gallery was opened in the JINR International Conference Centre. Its inaugural project was an exhibition of one of the most famous artists of our time, the pioneer of Russian kinetism Francisco INFANTE. At the opening of the exposition, he talked about what it is like to stand at the "gates of truth", why scientists and artists should not argue about infinity and what question he would ask infinity itself.

This year, your concept of "artifact" celebrates half a century. For 50 years, dozens of areas have changed in world art, digital media have developed, artificial intelligence has learned to generate images. Your artifacts are still created manually, in wildlife, using mirrors and threads. What is the secret of this approach and why has not this idea been exhausted?

- The meaning that I put into artifacts is philosophical, since I was initially worried about the idea of infinity. I didn't know what it was. I was like a man who couldn't swim, who was just thrown into the water. I floundered, tried to discover something for myself but I still had enough inner strength to stay afloat and to realize something.

Being engaged in creativity, a person can sometimes stand at the "gate of truth". It has happened twice in my life. The moment of coming before these gates is not immediately realized, most often you understand it retrospectively.

The first time it happened was in the 1960s, when I tried to understand what infinity was. To be honest, I still do not fully understand it. I'm not a scientist, I don't create verbal texts that have strict logic. I am an artist. My intuition has always worked. I have intuitively felt that the world is endless and I am just a grain of sand thrown into it. Trying to realize it, I have got engaged in geometric art.

The second time I found myself at these gates, was when I realized that nature itself can be endowed with an infinity sign. Nature has become a symbol for me. And the object of art that I bring to nature is a symbol of the technical part of the world. After all, art is always an act of symbolization that boils down to creating a metaphor. At some point, I have realized that a simple image on a plane was not suitable for adequate transmission of my ideas and I have started to create geometric objects in the space of nature. In some cases, an inevitable discrepancy arose because nature is natural and the object was invented by the artist. Thus, my idea of infinity was embodied in a symbol of nature and objects began to reflect the technical part of the world - all those technologies and machines that sound autonomously in our lives today.

This topic is really inexhaustible. I deliberately make each of my new cycle of "artifacts" different from the previous one. For me, what I'm working on right now is always preferable because that's how the new representation that I'm trying to implement comes about.

The first thing that is intuitively opposed to infinity is our life cycle. After all, human life is inevitably finite. Which of those created by man can survive us and this world?

- In the face of infinity, everything is infinite. It sounds like tautology but in philosophy it sometimes has an essential meaning.

Do you think our life is finite? If we take a single person's life - yes, he is born, lives and dies. But life does not end with you and me. There is a continuation - our children, descendants. They continue the life of their ancestors and it contains the most important sign of infinity inherent in everything. According to this principle, there are galaxies, human life is also arranged on a historical sense and the same is true for microparticles studied by quantum mechanics. So, all this is infinity.

Scientists that study the laws of the universe also deal with infinity - only in a scientific sense. Do you feel any intrinsic affinity with them? Is it possible that the artist and the scientist are engaged in one thing, just with different tools?

- Creativity unites everyone who is engaged in it, be it science or art. But the specifics are so different that I would not tell a scientist about infinity. It has its own logic and science-based theories. My language is different - the language of intuition. Here, I have nothing to say to scientists.

I know examples when scientists, thoroughly engaged in science, suddenly decide to take up the brush. And what they do, as an artist, usually does not suit me. Due to the specifics of consciousness, the scientist is inclined to portray what he already knows, he illustrates the facts. And art is not an illustration. This is the creation of a completely new thing, as evidenced by metaphor.

Metaphor is the main thing for the artist. It cannot be determined in advance. It is born out of a billion unions, synthesized in the mind or heart of a person inexplicably. That is why in art the realization of what you have created comes after the fact. We seem to retroactively begin to understand our own works. It's a living process.

Infinity is manifested and actualized precisely in our minds. We are aware of the world in accordance with something. For someone, the highest reference point can be God and for someone - infinity.

If you could ask a question to nature that you would definitely get answered, what would you ask?

- I can never get exact answers to my questions from anyone. But in abstract terms, I would ask, "Where does our past go?"

Sometimes, it seems to me: was it really what happened? After all, all this happened to me. They say that purely physiologically in an elderly person there is not a single cell left from the creature that he was in childhood. Everything has changed. But I understand that it was me!

Where does all this go? Where is it stored? Was this past as real as our conversation with you? There are childhood impressions that developed me as a person but what it is and where it is - I don't know. I would ask that question straight to infinity.

Scientists talk about the existence of a noosphere but it has not yet told me an answer. I don't know why I care so much. We do not know the future and as experience shows, we do not have to know everything about it. But was our past? Have I lived? Was it me? And where is that now? Here is the main mystery for me.

Evgeny BRAGIN, JINR Press Office