Sea sun (2020) Painting by Illia Prunenko

Series of paintings “Doom and Gloom” plays with the typical seriousness to which aesthetic practice essentiate different questions. A tiny piece painted in a Romantic spirit inaugurated the series in 2013, where it grew from tiny into a stream of large-scale canvas paintings which show organ-like, biomorphic and hypertrophied figures. Twisted, deformed, melted— they only partially resemble the insides of human bodies. They bear the imprint of a grand deformation, an unexpected and inhuman cataclysm. They evoke a feeling of rejection as all of them ruin familiar symbolic orders by resisting to be understood in the human’s gaze. They balance on a fine line between what is recognizable and what is alienated, escaping our very capacity to shape thinking. Prunenko’s process of painting aims to provide these pictorial shapes with the agency of their own; he paints impulsively, without any preconceived ideas of what might appear on the canvas. He resists the obsession of seeing the painting as a container of time and meaning or of something that needs to be encapsulated and archived. Instead, his figures merge, evolve, grow into each other, and renew themselves, all so to escape memory before the oil dries out.

Related themes

Organ-LikeDeformedMeltedSymbolicImpulsively