The exhibition project ‘Dreams of Frozen Music’ at the Tokyo Art Museum in Sengawa will present about 30 drawings from the last couple of years by the architect. These works are not meant to be “typical drafts” for architectural projects. No building is ever actually built according to them; rather, they can be seen as “free architectural fantasies.”

Tchoban’s esthetic approach, his visual language, and his artistic means seem not to be contemporary, but rather timeless. Classical orders of columns, domes of baroque churches, and elements of pre-modernist architecture are blended into surreal vedutas.

A technically brilliant draughtsman, Tchoban employs all kinds of materials, including ink, watercolor, red chalk, charcoal, and pastel. In his works, the notion of the classical capriccio is revisited — a fantastic and playful transgression of genres and art historical classifications.

The classicist aesthetics of ruins and quotations from revolutionary Soviet architecture, monuments of gigantic Lenin heads, and flooded buildings form a deeply mesmerizing landscape. The world the artist depicts seems out of joint; its foundations appear to defy final collapse. Modernism and postmodernism have not yet taken place.

The exhibition’s title – ‘Dreams of Frozen Music’ – refers to a phrase once used by the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who thereby created a poetic image for architecture. Harmony and measurement – classical principles of both music and architecture — come to mind. But the notion of “freezing” also evokes a particular atmosphere: on the one hand, a cool rationality and a sharply observing eye; on the other, a romantic sense of the beauty of decay mingles within these works.