Fata Morgana
Fata Morgana
Game of Civilization
2023
The world of mirages is a world of illusions. But unlike pure fantasy, a mirage reflects a real existing object. It is just usually much further and more unattainable than we see and perceive it. However, the very fact of the reality of the reflected object makes us think about the possibility of searching for it. Fata Morgana is a complex mirage with multiple reflections of reality, supplemented by our imagination. Today, in the conditions of a rapidly changing aggressive external world, we often seek support in the internal world, trying to create a world of illusions and hide in it. Sometimes we build the “castles in the air” in our minds, and sometimes these are dreams of something more real: a peaceful life, a new “quiet haven”, or, conversely, a dream of a place of power where we could fully realize our possibilities. Like a mirage, our fantasies are based on what we have already seen and can imagine.
In my new series of works I depict the fictional islands. I search in my mind for images of a "utopian" island that can temporarily obscure the reality close to me. But, like phantoms of distant vision, their motives certainly have their prototypes in the history of architecture, nature, modern technological processes. However, these motives are intertwined, sometimes unpredictably, as if in a dream, or in a complex mirage of Fata Morgana, giving birth to new eclectic images. Thus, the image of an ancient temple in its reflection appears as a futuristic industrial landscape, or the strict architectural motives of ancient Egypt are complemented by a network of antennas and radars. There is also an allusion of duality in the images, characteristic of the epoch of metamodernism. The islands in the paintings often have their own reflections, and in these reflections the objects sometimes appear already ruined by time or cataclysms. On the one hand, this is a hint at the inevitability of the consequences of the laws of entropy and the one-pointedness of the arrow of time, on the other hand, it is a reminder of the catastrophic consequences of attempts to realize utopian dreams. But still, times of chaos and destruction are inevitably replaced by times of stability and growth. And I would like the islands depicted in my works to be associated with the new land exposed after the flood, with the growth points of new life and a new civilization.
