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Rocambole Tarot      2003 Anna Nikolayeva      Russia                                                   Art Medium: Pen drawings with process colour. Description: The artword is a geometric representaion of Mayan-Toltec mythic symbolism. There are 25 Majors (four Fools) with four suits of 16 cards. Sergey de Rocambole lives in St Petersburg and is immersed in art and esoteric systems. He especially focuses on the idea of the labyrinth. In 1993 he set up a art group called Dragon's Springs. He later worked with Anna Nikolayeva on a tarot for this group, and it was eventually published in 2003. The artwork is neo-Mayan abstract computer graphics, but still quintessentially tarot. De Rocambole requires all sorts of complex underlying philosophies to give form to his work, and seems to need to retreat into a kind of exercise in non-communication "Labyrinth, as a sign of archaic meta-code, as a module-hieroglyph of initial hypertext, joins together a message of ancient tradition and tendencies of contemporary art with the possibility and desire to overcome the limits of binary axiomatic language with all its consequences for a person". The book that accompanies the deck has many complex cosmological, kabbalistical theories, and ideas from Gurdjieff (a Greek-Armenian mystic and spiritual teacher of the early 20th century who spent some time in Russia). De Rocambole obviously delights in this abstruse, esoteric, obscure and elevated theory, but the tarot deck created through his inspiration by Anna Nikolayeva is wonderfully straightforward, though translated into abstract geometric forms. She embeds this within Mayan symbolism and the result is rather impressive.