conceptual artist. based in London. 

site-specific installations with glass and optical objects

I entered the contemporary art through photography. Firstly, I was attracted by the literal meaning of the word photography – “to write with light”. My palette would be the light itself, I thought. While still receiving a bachelor's degree in the History of Arts, I realized that my favorite artist is Vermeer, because no one has depicted the air permeated by light in an interior. No one can surpass his Milkmaid, in which surfaces absorb light so plausibly. However, the strongest impression of the light I got in the sea on the coast of Spain, while diving along the rocky coast. The waves crashed heavily on the rocks and this created an indescribable magic the light under water.

I moved from the narrative to conceptuality very naturally and quickly. Clear compositions and narration within the frame have become for me too graceless statements. These are always statements, which one must either agree with or oppose them. I wanted a different viewer experience from interacting with my works. Rather, so that my works slow down the time a little, take the viewers out of the circle of the familiar and seen, surprise, but not obviously and outrageously, but delicately and quietly.

In the end, I was stuck trying to answer just one question. What is an image? If we discard all the rigid constructions that we inherited from the male philosophizing of Kant and Hegel, who taught us what a thing is and what aesthetics is. If we turn to the world's first artist. He made a colossal breakthrough – he actually depicted his reality. In this case, I am not interested at all in what purpose he pursued when depicting hunting, or whatever he depicted there for the first time, I admire this very action, which was performed by a human being for the first time ever. Before him, all people simply lived their reality and it never occurred to anyone to distance from it so much as to convey this whole voluminous and sensual world in a schematic two-dimensional drawing. It's like discovering quantum fields for the first time, an abstract concept that you try to prove to others. This artist, in my understanding, was the first and only artist, and all the others are just very weak shadows of him. Now we all just repeat after him this action – we comprehend reality with visual tools, detached from reality.

An artistic instinct led me to put the image of the depicted in the place of the depicted itself. In the glare on the glasses, I am interested in how the perception of the eye reacts to the refraction of light. It is our instinctive behavior to pay attention to the glare. Like any instinct, this one was developed by evolution throughout our formation. At the same time, the glass itself reflects reality. By inserting a photo of a glare under the glass, I create a double glare – the depicted and the real one. In addition to this, the presence of a viewer includes him in the work itself, since he is also reflected in all these glares.

All my artistic practice is an attempt to find the essence of the image. It seems to me that the more I create such precedents, the more professionals and thinkers see the practice of my questioning, the more likely it is to find an answer to this question.