Alisa Gorelova

The return to a “true form” is a common mythological trope, symbolizing a “revelation,” as if metamorphoses were merely a trick concealing the “truth.” This outlook creates a dichotomy between the impermanence of deception and the immutability of truth, as the world once seemed deterministic and complete from a divine perspective. But in the modern world, this notion has lost its relevance.

From the divine vantage point, today’s world looks less like an ordered whole than an impenetrable tangle of bodies, intentions, and chance. To know the truth is to understand its impermanence. True life is perpetual transformation. Alisa Gorelova offers a unique perspective on this theme in her new total installation, where disparate bodies reach toward a central canvas to merge into a tangle of art.

Her works reveal themselves most vividly as a whole, flowing one into another. A new step in Gorelova’s practice came with the exhibition “Hic sunt dracones” at GROUND Solyanka, where whimsical images burst onto the walls, filling the space. Yet the fresco-like monumentality can at times restrain the living, fluid bodily forms. In her new project, the artist goes further, rendering boundaries throughout the gallery space unstable and porous.

Within the PA Gallery project, Alisa turns to the body at the moment it loses its individual self-enclosure. She reflects on this as a passage from subjectivity to totality. The installation enacts this shift: the central canvas was produced in her studio, an intimate, individual space, yet the work attains its final form within the social space of the gallery, in full view of the audience.

The mythological narratives referenced by the project highlight the instability of boundaries: among them are Daphne transforming into a tree to hide from Apollo, and the tragic fate of the people of Pompeii, buried, “fused”, beneath a single lava flow, deprived of their subjectivity to become part of a total history.
In the new installation, Alisa loops the transitional state: images spill beyond the canvas onto the walls, only to reenter the painting again, twice breaking through the pictorial boundaries. Within this field of transformations, boundary rupture is rendered absolute, for at the apex of the bodies’ gravitation the processes of dissolution and confluence become indistinguishable. The viewers find themselves in a kind of temporal rupture, so that from their perspective the instant of transformation appears as a stream of merging and repelling bodies tending toward infinite entropy.

Kirill Eltsov