(b. 1979, Moscow)
Personal web: www.zmogk.com
Email: hello@zmogk.com
Instagram: @zmogk
"As a painter, I am studying the psychology of color to trace how color
affects a person’s emotions, their general psycho-emotional state and,
consequently, their quality of life and the general environment around
them. My paintings are suspended between figuration and abstraction,
committing to neither completely. This seesaw between recognizable
and formless parts of a painting creates a deeper engagement for the
viewers, inviting them to reconstruct the past actions and processes that
defined the current state of the canvas.
Coming from a personal perspective and reception of color, I register
mood swings and emotional warps created by the intrusion of historical
contexts and world events we find ourselves in. My work is not a direct
commentary on the current news, though. My choice of semi-abstract
idiom is based on a profound desire to stop filling the visual environment
with forgettable topical imagery. Instead, I view my paintings as totems
and transmitters of energy. They are supposed to inspire a re-evaluation
of emotional states, recharging the psyche through color perception.
In my process, I analyze the emotional background colors create,
experience them sensually, then create a sketch that has one dominant
color and a few others. The process itself is a search for a balance
between the intuitive, subconscious, radically free initial stage of work on
the sketch and the clear, orderly, and rational stage of bringing it to
completion. In many ways, my process is exactly the opposite of the
viewer’s subsequent untangling of the image.
In some of my recent paintings part of the composition is located on the
sides of the stretcher. Often these are the brightest fragments, done
using reflexive paint, that cast light on the surface around the painting
and seem to vibrate on the periphery of our vision, as if some memory or
emotion hidden in the subconscious but affecting us and oursurroundings."