Metamorphoses
2015-2018
Observations of everyday life is the main theme of my paintings. For me, it’s always important to get direct impression from the object. I use this general concept through every series of paintings. Topics for them can be the most usual day-to-day affairs such doing sport exercises, taking shower, works in the garden, supermarket shopping or touristic voyages.
During travels around different cities and countries, I observe works of art and household items exhibited in museums. For the last three years, I work on the project «Metamorphoses», the series that is devoted to the objects of prehistorical era and their influence to contemporary art and street art. I collect a kind of «personal collection» or «archive» of impressions after all these objects I’ve seen, combinating and documenting them in the form of paintings and drawings of different size. I do each of my paintings in one session, and that’s how I attain the maximum concentration and accuracy to deliver my own impressions in representation of the object. I choose the strangest, unclear looking exhibits. For example, in my archive about the prehistorical era, there are alabaster two headed figurines from Ain-Ghazal, stone idols of Celtic culture, statuettes of Lizardmen from Ubaid region, fragments of stone bodies of Mont’e Prama Giants, Venus of Kostenki, Temple of Dendera reliefs, mushroom headed Lunigiana figures and many others. Very often, history and purposes of these objects are lost in time. I’m interested in the duality of these items: from one point their origins are from the very dawn of civilizations and at the same time there is something futuristic in their view. Maybe that’s why their strange, distorted forms influenced so much the art of 20th century and still influencing the art of 21th century. In the part devoted to modern civilization, the subjects for my paintings are contemporary art sculptures, science art objects and the actors of street theatre: so called «living sculptures». They can be seen in touristic centers of cities around the world, reflecting and mixing some popular images collected and filtered through centuries.
The project continues along with my movement around the world and constantly updates with new paintings. This is the way I progress my collection of paintings, which has some similarities with travel notes or kunst camera, but at the same time differs greatly because it’s not a collection of objects or their images, but it’s the collection of my own impressions. These represented objects receive new colors, scale and transform into independent compositions.