Auction has ended
Not so long ago I noticed that «fantastic» animals started appearing in my works much more often – unicorns, pinnipeds, chimeras and other bizarre creatures, which contemporary artists fear much more than any other person for some reason. No, this is not a tribute to the hobby of fantasy at all. On the contrary, the reason for this is the desire to get close to the very reality of today, to seize its character, to introduce those images, that by their intrusion will show the impetuous and unstoppable process of the irrationalization of life, into the territory of actual Russian painting. Comfortable existence in the spoiled modernist world remains for us only a nostalgic memory in the conditions of the information society created on its foundations, whose technological capabilities gave new life to all those gods, spirits and chthonic essences that, under the pressure of intellectual Enlightenment attacks, seemed to be buried forever in the pages of special studies on mythology and folklore.
However, the XXI century is the age of the great liberation of monsters, the revival of dragons and the prosperity of the Cerberus. And mass culture is the pledge of this, which again constructs consumer consciousness, relying equally on the revolutionary achievements of applied science and on the eternal stronghold of ideology – the myth. As a result, the picture of our world is hardly capable of rational description. Here the most incredible creature, through the efforts of a host of unknown figures in the entertainment industry, acquires flesh and blood, convinces anyone of its existence with much greater success than an ordinary worker, teacher, system administrator. The irrational becomes ordinary. I set my goal to express the shocking habituality of the impossible. So, in this composition, the rider, hurrying on his business on the scooter, turns out to be Cerberus, the guardian of the underworld. And his appearance seems to be something very ordinary in this situation – you'll think, a three-headed dog rushes along the road, overtaking people – as if stuck and discolored, turning into statues before our eyes.
Egor Koshelev
