Alexander Morozov: After an Unknown Artist "Willem Van Orange", egg tempera on wooden board, 2024
Solo exhibition entitled “Lost Memories”, on view from 23 January until 15 March 2025, brings together two series of paintings created by Alexander Morozov (b. 1974 in Lougansk, UA) and united by the theme of the phenomenon of human memories and its interconnection with the flow of time.
In its content and its focus, Alexander Morozov’s artistic practice is similar to memory studies. The artist is interested in memory as a tool and an activity that simultaneously records the past and transfers its imprint to the present.
By exploring the boundaries between the intangible image and the form, the text and the image, the dark areas of memory and consciousness, he creates paradoxical personal spaces, emphasizing the areas of social and psychological rupture.
Among Alexander Morozov’s prominent projects are The Black Book and Icons series. In the first the artist turns to the theme of the gaps in the cultural memory, recreating artifacts destroyed during the military conflicts. The second is focused on depicting everyday subjects in the egg tempera technique, characteristic of European art in the 15th–17th centuries.
Collectively, the works in both series presented in the exhibit constitute a visual and poetic statement on the lost past and its ubiquity in the present.
“Following on from such artists as Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, Morozov considers that figurative painting can and should be an instrument for the preservation of memory, regaining a function entirely traditional for that medium…
…Morozov’s The Black Book project begins with the discovery of a moment when the continuity of memory and the disruption of it find embodiment in a specific event.
It includes paintings created on the basis of works by celebrated artists of different periods that were lost during the Second World War or other political conflicts.
The artist produces replicas of works created within the bounds of various European cultural paradigms, from the Renaissance to the Modern Era.” Anastasia Kotyleva.
The artist's interest and reflections on the nonlinearity of memory and its relationship with the passage of time, the spontaneous and random shaping of memories and their ability to reveal the invisible are expressed and developed in the works from the Icons series presented in the Lost Memories exhibit.
In this series Alexander Morozov employs egg tempera, the medium historically used for painting during the Medieval and early Renaissance periods.
Through the lengthy meditative process of creating works with tempera the artist gets into a specific state, enabling the illusory and intangible to manifest, to pass into material form, imprinted in the painting through the movement of the brush, a peculiar recording of the subconscious through gesture.
Most of the tempera paintings are based on photographs taken by the artist. Some works recreate the original picture with precision, while others artfully interpret it, departing from the digital source.
In his works, the artist explores the relationship between the medium of digital photography and that of painting, revealing the levels of mediation involved in the creation and interpretation of images.
For the artist, photographs are a kind of markers or notches on the time coordinate axis, images associated with certain moments in memory. He traces the flow of time through a sequence of stills. The moments recorded by the camera are selective and random, but their sequence builds a chronicle of what is happening and being transformed into memories.
In the Icons series, Alexander Morozov combines everyday subjects and the sacred light-bearing ground of the icon on which they are depicted, creating a synthesis of the ordinary and the spiritual and imparting new meaning to the depicted images. Fragmentation and the absence of an obvious narrative make us feel a metaphysical presence behind simple objects, which likewise manifests itself in the process of creating the works.
Thus, during the creation of tempera “Glove,” a stone shaped object on the ocean shore turned into a worker glove, while a hole in the wall acquired the silhouette of an animate being’s profile in “Keeper of the Old House”.
When built up in many layers, the translucent quality of the tempera allows light to penetrate the surface of the picture and bounce around between the particles of pigment creating an especially luminous surface. This quality is characteristic for historical tempera works, notably for religious icon paintings, in which the inner glow symbolizes the presence of the Holy Spirit and liberation from darkness.
Temperas painted on the gesso made from chalk mined near Vicenza are especially luminous. According to the artist, the special luminosity of the gesso is important to him, as it is the effect of light reflection from the chalk ground that allows the tempera to shine from within.
Is it this ground-deep glow, penetrating through numerous transparent layers of paint, that can be perceived a symbol of overcoming and transforming personal experience into a transcendental experience of living the present?
