Alisa Gorelova
Evgeny Chubarov

Corpus Mundi

 The PA Gallery booth presents a dialogue between two artists: Alisa Gorelova (b. 1988) and Evgeny Chubarov (1934–2012). Their works seem to complement each other in an attempt to describe the paradoxical “body of the world” in its stasis and dynamism, despite the half-century time gap between them. Their encounter is a collision of chaos and order, of explosive expression and tense restraint. It is a dialogue about the nature of energy — that which expands outward, and that which holds space within.

“A body is an image offered to other bodies, a whole corpus of images stretched from body to body, local colors and shadows, fragments, grains, areolas…”

Jean-Luc Nancy

The world of Evgeny Chubarov is a space measured by bodies. Each of these bodies is born from lines resembling whirlpool funnels, tornado spirals, or the circulation of protons in the Large Hadron Collider. Black holes turned inside out — these are the forms that make up Chubarov’s “bubbling reality.” Circular movements of the brush reveal the volume of white, which seems to gain a palpable density. Black spirals of paint trace outlines, borders, points of contact, collision, and merging of bodies, all the while preserving the integrity, inner energy, and archaic selfhood of each of the faceless figures populating Chubarov’s world.

Alisa Gorelova’s painting follows the energetic contours of hands, legs, fingers, and heads that twist into bizarre curves and convulsive knots. Clusters of intersecting lines simultaneously support and tear apart the pictorial masses formed by literally screaming colors. The paint at times emphasizes the weight and motion of forms, at times spills in long drips, invading the structure of the composition and breaking down the plastic core of its form.

The temporal gap between the works of Evgeny Chubarov and Alisa Gorelova is fifty years.The intersection, in a shared space, of Chubarov’s small black-and-white sheets and Gorelova’s monumental canvases reveals a common point of origin — a single impulse that shapes the structure and fabric of their painting. Their art "paints" the body of the world, or a world of bodies, conceived as the basis of the existence of humanity and the existence of art.

In the 1990s, from the clash of bodies shattered into the smallest particles and scattered in a chaotic stream of energy that pushed them beyond the canvas, emerged Chubarov’s vast abstract works, expressing a new sensation of the cosmos. In the 2020s, Alisa Gorelova restores outlines and volumes to bodies — but not their autonomy — as if to demonstrate the loss of bodily wholeness as a vessel for the soul, as a unit, as a monad in which, according to Leibniz, the universe is enclosed. Thus, the thought expressed by Jean-Luc Nancy thirty years ago finds visual embodiment: that we are approaching “a world without the Subject of its destiny, having place only as a fabulous crowding-together of bodies.”

Curator: Irina Gorlova