Memory cells. Travel to Portugal, 2020, 80x80cm, oil on canvas

The idea of ​​painting came about after visiting Portugal. I was so inspired by this bright, cheerful country that I tried to write in the style of the traditional Portuguese Azulejos, which is a painted clay tile, most often square in shape, burnt, glazed, measuring 14 cm by 14 cm.

These are small plots, my memories of this amazing country. The idea was also to fill the picture with light, color, the joy of life, art, and so that each storyline echoes the neighboring one, and that when looking at the picture you also wanted to go there.

It’s also my reflection, the dialogue with Portuguese artists – Ana Vieira (1940-2016) and its installation “Ambiente – Sala de Jantar” (“The Environment – the Dining Room”), as well as Almada Negreiros (1893 – 1970) with whose work whom I met in the museum of Galust Gyulbenkyan. This is an art museum in Lisbon, which stores a collection of European fine art, as well as a number of monuments of oriental and ancient art, assembled by businessman Galust Gyulbenkyan. It was opened on October 2, 1969 according to the will of a billionaire and is subsidized by a fund named after him.

“The way Gulbenkian used his fortune throughout his life, and the way he disposed of it in his will, demonstrates his understanding of the social function of wealth and its corresponding obligations,” they will write in Portugal 20 years after the death of Galust Gulbenkian.

Memory cells. Family, 2020, 80x80cm, oil on canvas

Family – how much meaning and love is putting into one word!

This is the source of the most sacred values of man. This is a school of love, a school of morality, spiritual values.

If a person speaks of a house as a heart, then a family is his soul, his thoughts and feelings. Unfortunately, we do not always tell our loved ones about our feelings for them. How often do we really think and worry about them.

Now we live in a difficult time, when everyone is scared of the virus. The pandemic is growing and it seems that quarantine will last forever.

However, what else, if not quarantine, could force us to slow down and reflect. What is important for us … Money, career, success? On the other hand, the health of their loved ones, the warmth of spiritual conversations, the unconditional love of relatives.

At such moments, you begin to appreciate the time spent with people dear to yourself. The memory cells themselves begin to give out happy moments that you want to capture for centuries.

In this picture, I wanted to betray that fullness of feelings of warmth, love overwhelming my soul. What unites four generations of completely different people? Different in profession, different in temperament, different in age and experience. At the same time wonderfully getting along with each other. The foundation of family values unites all – caring, respect and of course unconditional love!

The universe has once again made us aware of the true wealth of man. Thank it for that!

Memory cells. Dreams, 2020, 80×80 cm, oil on canvas

In isolation, the installation of the Portuguese artist Ana Vieira (1940-2016) and her installation “Ambiente – Sala de Jantar” (“Environment – Dining Room”) always appeared before my eyes. This once again shows how much a work of art can be, and how you can rethink it in the current time and moment, and how much it matches your current worldview. It was a litmus test for me, which you put in a glass and you see a chemical reaction.

Such a chemical reaction showed the picture “Dreams”. Where in a confined space in his room the kid dreams of the sea, or maybe I used to dream very much about the sea, which I saw for the first time in my 30s.

Whether it will remain a dream, whether it depends only on us, as it turned out not. The whole world has paused, and now attempts are just beginning to enter a normal course. Therefore, the question arises that a person appreciates what he has to lose.

For me it is freedom. What is happiness when there is freedom, when there is freedom of movement, when there is freedom of choice, freedom of speech, freedom to do what you like? When you can freely walk the streets, travel to different countries and go to the sea.

All roads lead to Rome, 2020, 80×80 cm, oil on canvas

This work was influenced by my teaching: Materials and Technique, New York School of Abstract Artists.
Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko influenced in terms of color and transparency, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock added expression, Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt silence and tranquility, Yayoi Kusama that everything in the world is based on love and that anything is possible!

All roads lead to Rome is about what you still come to regardless of the chosen path of achievement.

In fact, initially this expression arose as a rather dry statement of the fact that indeed all the roads that were built in Ancient Rome led to its capital, or rather, to “foro romano” – the Roman Forum, the market square of the city, and it sounded on Latin as “Omnes viae Romam ducunt”.
However, the artistic word still has a greater power of persuasion than naked statistics, and this phrase became really winged when it was used in his fable “The Arbitrator, Brother of Mercy and Hermit” (1694) by the famous Jean La Fontaine, French poet and fabulist, having put into it the meaning “you can reach one goal in different ways” (“Tous chemins vont Rome).

It is possible to start over and go your own way.

Memory Cells, Deep inside, 2020, oil on canvas, 80x80cm

There are about a million kilometers of connections in the human brain. One can easily imagine a physical model: we have a million of the finest wires in our heads. Naturally, the question arises how, with a huge number of combinations, the brain in a split second extracts the information we need: dates, facts, formulas, poems, etc. Obviously, no modern computer, no computing system, and even the Internet can provide this. It is clear that the system for searching for specific information is completely different. In such an incomprehensible database for understanding, the brain “manages” in this database to find such trifles as, for example, one character, one hieroglyph, one picture, and also a whole array of data consisting of numerous numbers or images. Moreover, it seems to us that this happens instantly.

“Between space and time … one thing … it is not fully understood. Brain patterns – they both reflect the picture of the world and are reflected in the picture of the world. But in the brain, time is transformed into space. A lot of things that turn out to be the past are recorded on the brain cells, and it turns out to be in the distributed space of the brain, but the temporal structure is possible during reproduction, any, including, it turns out, it is possible to go into the past. You dig further and further, reach your childhood in the space of the brain. ” This is a quote from the book by Natalya Petrovna Bekhtereva “The Magic of the Brain”.

Memory Сells. Egypt, 2020, acrylic, oil on canvas, 80x80cm

Memory Cells. Egypt / Memory cells. Egypt.
Egypt is not the Promised Land: it is a land created by man day after day, year after year, a work that is renewed endlessly, where the creations are mixed with the image of the Creator. There are no sharp differences between gods and people: there gods dwell among mortals; their faces are the same human faces or the images of animals that surround them on earth and in heaven. In every piece of the Egyptian land – water and universal, cosmic fire, death and resurrection, human essence and divine essence.
That is why, when I saw one family of Egyptians, it seemed to me that the gods came to life, I wanted to draw them.
The ancient Egyptians were an extremely life-oriented people who largely tried to supplant the thought of age and death. Instead, the concept of life in the afterlife and rebirth was put to the fore.

The thinking of the ancient Egyptian people was not rational – logical, but figuratively – symbolic. There was a magic principle that all perfect, great things are reflected in something small, outwardly nondescript – both above and below, the macrocosm is equal to the microcosm. On this basis, the scarab beetle became a symbol of the rising sun, and the sky could be depicted as a cow. In the same way, it was possible, through symbolic actions and drawings, to influence important processes taking place in the world of the Gods and in the other world. The symbols themselves were attributed to their inherent inner strength, something like an essence or soul.

The ancient Egyptian religion contained a huge number of deities with diverse forms of manifestation. Gods – as, indeed, people – were supposed to have a large number of different qualities of character, so that one and the same deity could be depicted in all kinds of incarnations.

Ankh is one of the most important ancient Egyptian symbols with the meaning of “life” (“immortality”), also known as “crux ansata”. The sign is very simple but powerful. It combines two symbols – a cross, as a symbol of life, and a circle, as a symbol of eternity. Their combination means immortality.

The Eye of Horus is the emblem of the falcon-headed god of the sky Horus, a symbol of the all-seeing eye and the unity of the cosmos, the integrity of the universe. According to ancient Egyptian myth, the moon eye of Horus was snatched out by Set in the battle for supremacy among the gods, but after the victory of Horus in this battle, it grew again. This myth became the reason for the extreme popularity of the Eye of Horus as a warding off evil amulet. The spiral under the eye (shaped like a galaxy) symbolizes energy and perpetual motion.
The Eye of Horus was also associated with healing, as ancient Egyptian physicians often viewed illness as analogous to the battle between Horus and Set.
In mathematics, the Eye had a curious function – it was used to denote fractions. According to one version of the myth, Seth cut the torn out eye of Horus into 64 parts, so his incomplete image symbolizes some fractional number: the pupil is 1/4, the eyebrow is 1/8, etc.

These are my memories, my acquaintance with Egypt, to be continued …

Memory Cells, Spain, 2020, oil on canvas, 80×80

Polyphony

When I wrote my work “Memory cells. Spain “, the word “Polyphony” flew to me, and this despite the fact that I have never done music.
Polyphony in music is a type of polyphony when several melodies sound simultaneously in a vocal or instrumental work.
Polyphony in literature and painting: artistic diversity, versatility of the work, its complex structure.

A direct hit with my Memory Cells, since each fragment of the picture is an independent party, each fragment written is endowed with its own voice, its own “knowledge of the world.”
But in general, this is a kind of game of mind, intuition and remember!