The Birth of a Citizen Painting

I explore the experience of being an observer of digital space. The modern content delivery methods such as instant posting and live broadcasts, allow viewer to be in the epicenter of events without physical participation. I construct my own stories based on these impressions. Painting allows me to impart these digital phantoms with a substance. Sketches for my works are assembled from digital artifacts. I produce digital manipulations with fragments of news, videos, and live broadcasts. I combine contradictory elements to deconstruct the original narrative. While creating painting I combine figurative and abstract painting. Elements of realism make works plausible. But random deformations, cropping of forms, breaking of space, and color distortions make the interpretation almost impossible. Each fragment dissolves its meaning within the frame. Blurring one image into another, one narrative into another, one way of seeing into another. Stories behind these forms capture the unpredictability and redundancy of reality. Outsider (2020) is based on newsfeed representing a modern civil protest. In these images, well-equipped subjects are confronted against a disparate mass of unarmed people. Paintings capture the contrast of this unequal confrontation: technogenicity versus flesh, abstract and figurative, spatial and flat, narrative versus incoherent. Kids with Cams (2019-20) is a series of portraits of webcam models. Paintings are emerged from broadcast fragments. In this project I explore the moment of self-presentation and contact with an anonymous viewer. War with the Sense (2018) derived from newsfeed images relating to events on the Middle East. The original images are deconstructed and assembled into a new narrative that is more frustrating and obscure.