Working process*

I am inspired by the nature of painting. I often use photos or videos as sketches for my work. Sometimes it’s my own material, sometimes I use quotes from movies or other artists' works. Before that, there was a long period when I was engaged in abstract painting. Now this work with generation of forms has found itself in the shape of an additional frame of horizontal black stripes above and below the canvas. I am interested in the cinematic technique of entering another space through the "black curtains" of cinema. This is my symbol of space-time coordinates, a way of extended viewing, my chronotope, a reason to think "What is the painting today?"

It all started with the triptych Meeting made in 2009 on the basis of Red Desert by Michelangelo Antonioni. A direct storyboard, moving towards, a story about the key moment of choice ... Since it was a literal repetition, it occurred to me to insert screen curtains to indicate a quote. And it became clear that this frame from above and below was an essential element of the picture - it gave an entrance, made the object out of the work separating the spectator from what was happening inside the canvas, real life from the invented one, opening side exits, like an extension. There was a clear feeling that a way to combine the conceptual and the procedural in the picture was found. After all, the picture gave birth to the movie. It has a duration, it is always between "was" and "will be", just "at the moment" it slips away. And if you take a frame and make a picture out of it, you get a concentrated movement, and it is exactly “here”.

The very presence of black is also very important to me, it is like a tuning fork to the colour, it holds everything and reminds of the screen, the computer, the telephone, the TV, of the other technogenic reality in which we live. Sometimes the main element of the picture is a geometric figure and a local color, sometimes a font, and then the “word” becomes the centre of the mood.

​

We live in an amazing time of endless fixation in the picture. We shoot everything - close and far, from microscopes and intergalactic stations, great cinema and overfull phones of average citizens overlapping each other, forming a huge layer of visual – and all this is stored somewhere ... What for? What does this have to do with the phenomenon of memory? And what is the value of the picture in this stream?

I work with movies which I can associate with my life, where the plot is lived personally, for example, I recognise the Italian landscape and recode it into the Russian landscape. The sky, boats, trees on the horizon, a real explosion, like an explosion of consciousness, are subject to common understanding, and are experienced by everyone separately, and can be in any place, any country ... The pictures based on Jim Jarmusch's movie Permanent Vacation show the deserted interior of the cinema and the overgrown corner of the abandoned construction site, that can be found anywhere. Sometimes I deliberately take the character out of the frame to enhance this feeling. Pictures from the series The Sheltering Sky based on Bernardo Bertolucci's movie also refer to the experience of everyone who has risked to take a trip to the unknown, to another place of their destiny.

I am attracted by movies that can remain open, where the meanings are not tied to the social, and the discovery of new meanings is possible in seemingly insignificant episodes. The exhibition presents sessions of works based on Red Desert and Zabriskie Point – movies by Michelangelo Antonioni. The picture WIND is a word from edge to edge, the landscape with the wind, the house, the smoke. The movement of the group of people is fixed in the negative, their feelings are not shown ... They are changeable ... I would like the viewer to repeat “wind, wind, wind" sounding like a blizzard ... I'm interested in the idea "the body of the landscape". On the one hand, this allows you to perceive it as your own body, on the other hand, in the landscape there is always the nature of alienation, the nature of the unknowing of ourselves. This duality is most evident in the horizon because it does not really exist, it is an imaginary line. It refers to the pictures Premonition and On the Eve.

For me, a picture is always a clot of the existential, where there is a touch to the essential, often unconsciously, due to frequent touching the canvas, where questions do not have a common answer, but perhaps here, in the constant variability, happens a watershed of choice - I accept or I don't.

I compose a movie of my feelings. Fragments of memories about events, paintings, chronicles of home photos. They are often self-portraits, the favourite motif is a self-portrait in a mirror, since a mirror is also a movie, transition to another dimension. Sometimes this is a self-portrait in a specific situation, sometimes in an extended time period. For example, in the picture Dream we are sitting on the sofa and somewhere nearby there is a Titian's album opened on the page The Shepherd and the Nymph. It had been opened on this page so long ago that it became the first plan. Renaissance motives are close to me, the motives of a “naked” body, not “nude”, but naked, uncovered. The dialogue of the two is taken from different time periods, the layers of the present and the past live between certainty and surprise, between two time periods two greyhounds are running... they are always naked, they are the nature.