Alisa Gorelova

In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges wrote about the dragon as a creature capable of taking forms incomprehensible to humans. The phrase "Here be dragons," found on the 16th-century Lennox Globe — the second oldest known globe —marked uncharted and dangerous lands. These were territories of monsters whose forms were still unknown, emerging only faintly from the indistinct, the unrecognizable, and the negative, owing to their capacity for perpetual transformation.

When selecting symbolic figures to describe the metamorphoses in Alisa Gorelova's new exhibition, one could settle on the dragon—her latest series delves into the theme of the inexplicable. Maintaining the monumentality of forms and the fresco-like approach to compositional thinking, the artist continues to depict a dynamic ornament of bodies, a convulsive and subjectless "human clay." She employs a Mannerist-Baroque iconography, amplifying its expressiveness with psychedelic fluorescent paints.

But the once total anthropocentrism of the imagery, composed of countless "feats" and "triumphs", muscular torsos, shoulders, calves, and hands, is now invaded by the mouths, claws, tentacles and horns of characters from bestiaries. Scenes featuring these elements take on the character of fight and confrontation.

Monsters serve as symbols of the alien, the other, the unassimilable within established terminologies. Their extensive iconography is drawn from historical and mythological works, which Mannerism—embracing the irrational and mystical—once elevated to the pinnacle of genre hierarchies.

It could be said that postmodern poetics in its contemporary form resonates with Mannerism as a precursor to Baroque—a culture of folds and distortions that dramatically acknowledged the illusory nature of harmonious worldviews. As Gilles Deleuze wrote in his lectures on Leibniz, it replaces substance with a flow of metamorphoses.
In a similar manner, Alisa Gorelova, among many contemporary artists, reflects on the present as a reality where information streams increasingly diverge and blatantly contradict one another, the coherence of even familiar plots disintegrates, and narratives are rewritten, much like old, crumbling frescoes in temples. Addressing such a contemporary reality is only possible in the indirect form of paradoxes, koans or new myth.
In Borges' equally famous classification, citing a "Chinese encyclopedia," animals "belonging to the Emperor" are listed alongside suckling pigs and sirens, followed by those "running wildly" or "drawn with the finest brush of camel hair." This whimsical taxonomy, which points to the illusory nature of rational and stable notions of order underlying the comprehension of the world, serves as the starting point for Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, a work exploring historical configurations of thought.

The logic of such "strange rapprochements" has long become the norm in both artistic languages and curatorial narratives.

Alisa Gorelova's world expands its horizons in her new exhibition, evolving into a fully-fledged alternative reality. The artist does not perceive its internal conflicts as insoluble; rather, she is intrigued by the multidimensionality and potential of this new experience. Dragons, in the history of humanity, were not merely monsters but also deities. It is no coincidence that a Chinese poem says, "A mountain should not be measured by its height but by whether it is beautiful enough to attract dragons."

Konstantin Zatsepin