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 Yegeny Chubarov is space measured in bodies. Each of these bodies is born from lines that mimic whirlpool or tornado funnels, or perhaps the circulation of protons in the Large Hadron Collider. "Black holes turned inside out" is how Vitaly Patsyukov, author of an article for Chubarov's solo exhibition catalogue, describes the forms from which the artist builds his bubbling reality. The circular motions of the brushes draw forth a voluminous whiteness, as if it were acquiring a tangible denseness. The black spirals of paint mark the contours, borders, points of tangent, collisions, and merging of bodies. Yet each of these faceless heroes that populates Chubarov's world retains its integrity, internal energy, and archaic identity.

The painting of Alisa Gorelova chases after spiraling and whimsically curving energetic contours of arms, legs, fingers, and heads, which interweave into convulsive knots. The clusters of intersecting lines support and at the same time sever the painted matter created in screaming colors. The paint underscores the weight and movements of the shapes and also flows off into long streaks that intrude upon the structure of the composition and destroy the malleable framework of its core.

Half a century separates the works of Yevgeny Chubarov and Alisa Gorelova. The meeting of Chubarov's small black and white sheets and Gorelova's enormous canvases in the same space emphasizes their common source – the holistic impulse that forms the structure and fabric of their art. Their task is to draw the body of the world, or the world of bodies, which are seen as the foundation of being for both humanity and art.

In the 1990s Chubarov demonstrated his new sense of the universe in large abstract works, which emerged from a collision of bodies and their subsequent disintegration into tiny particles, dispersing in a chaotic flow of energy that pushed them outside the boundaries of the canvas. In the 2020s Alisa Gorelova has returned outline and volume to these bodies, but not their independence, as if to demonstrate the loss of the body's wholeness as a receptacle for the soul, as a single unit, the monad within which, according to Leibnitz, the universe exists. It is a visual manifestation of Jean-Luc Nancy's idea, thirty years ago, that we are on the verge of a world with "no Subject for its destiny, taking place only as a prodigious press of bodies".

Curator Irina Gorlova