Alone With...
My work consists of an amalgam of icons and symbols. It embodies the aesthetics of media as vast, contemplative fields of intimate meditation. It incorporates strong social commentary on personal iconography, which is replicated and materialised through my work.
In my latest works "Alone with...". I want to invite you to a journey through a dark, yet colourful universe, inhabited by various characters – both well known and anonymous, portrayed in different situations and alternative realties. Observed from a distance, the work reminds a surreal landscape painting, a panorama in which a dark sky overshadows dissolving urban spaces and chaotic happenings. Yet, as one steps closer to observe the details of the large composition, the viewer is lured into a manifold parade of comedia-dell’arte...
In a flow of consciousness, shards of existence materialize out of the complex construction, exaggerated forms of creation, birth and death mix with hilarious scenes – I am laughing with the viewer at our old icons and symbols.
In this way, I describe a deeply subjective and at the same time uncanny familiar world, in which nothing seems to be in place anymore, not even the very margins of reality itself.
Everyday we are born, and every moment we are vulnerable …
We lacked any identity during the communist times; we were given patterns and procedures for all actions, even feelings. We were full of fake emotions... We were under the total repression - we worked to hear their praise, we sang songs for them, our leaders slept in our beds, their portraits reminded us what To Do, how to smile, how to love...
We lived, if you could call it living, in a great caged zoo! We had "everything", but freedom to make our own mistakes...
I create these images to celebrate my freedom criticizing old icons.
Time to investigate...
I have attempted to create new images to find the boundaries between real and virtual, past and future which we suddenly could see and cross to identify ourselves.
This question I asked myself for many years and still continue to ask.... both from a psychological and social perspective.
My intention is to depict this inner concern, along with other elements, in the new images I created.
Is there any better way to do it than to look through the eyes of a baby. These little creatures which are desperately trying to find their position in this world.
Once I found in my atelier thick layers of dried paint. These bizarre forms seemed like a beautiful landscape to me. And this is how I started developing the idea of young explorers.
In modern society there is much disconnection and lack of any unbiased look at the future. In this project, I wanted to contrast the concept of the End of the world with the Beginning of a new universe which we create by forcing ourselves to step into new dimensions and time like a newborn baby.
My thoughts
Like
Newborn
babies,
They are curious,
Playful,
Joyful.
THEY HAVE NO FEAR
We are on the verge of being no more threatened, of taking that leap to freedom, and I want to be free. And I want us to be free. I want my children to be free.
I'm going to force you to acknowledge yourself -- living in fear is not a life worth living.
I am sick and tired of all those who say: "This is just the way the world is".
I WANT TO SAY
NO
NO
NO
NO
This is the way the world has been
Manipulated
Transformed
Raped
AND THROWN IN THE RUBBISH DUMP.
I want to awake the baby in you and let it free...
Our children are not our children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through us but not from us....
And though they are with us yet they belong not to us.
They are our continuation... And the same applies to the "baby" inside us. I want to equalize our children and the "baby" inside us ... We let them go, to explore the world...We want them to be "Us". How to take care about them? How to destroy the fear of exploring the world?
I don't want to have visual satisfaction but instead I want to awake the viewer and create a critical attitude with him that can expand through our society.
I am questioning the word power, as babies are creatures that are weak and unprotected from (because of) their nature.
My purpose is to have the open conversation between the viewer and the images I create.
I think that sexuality is the power of life, and love is its emotional component. We talk so much about love but not about sexuality. Yet we forget that we need both to be fully satisfied...
The history of sexuality over the past three hundred years has been a history of repression. Sex, except for the purposes of reproduction, was a taboo. The only way to liberate us from this repression, according to this hypothesis, is to be more open about our sexuality, to talk about sex, and to enjoy it.
Foucault asks how it happened that we have come to see sex as the key explaining ourselves, as the thing that speaks truth about us. The answer has to do with the relationship between sex, power and knowledge. Power is everywhere and works in all directions.
Isn't it then that sexuality is something which power represses, but at the same time a great channel of power. Foucault identifies four major focus points: the sexuality of children, women, married couples, and the sexually "perverse."
Increasingly, sex became an object of knowledge. Other cultures have treated sex as an object of knowledge, as an ars erotica: an art of sensual pleasure. Our, Russian/Soviet culture is distinct, however, in treating sex as a scientia sexualis: an object of distanced, scientific investigation, the instrument of exploring the world.
The "right of death" in the age of absolutism has been replaced with a "power over life"!