"Naked people in a Naked World"

The human body is the main subject of Alisa Gorelova's art. Studied by specialists in anatomy and painters of the last five centuries, in his paintings he has an unusual, disturbing, mysterious aspect. The image lives, breathes and pulsates, approaching the limits where it risks breaking down into spots of color or losing the composition that can be understood by all, becoming something like a flower or a flame. It is impossible to find two identical figures here: they intertwine to form a chain, they overflow the narrow canvases and stretching towards each other, they transmit the impulse that appeared for the first time in the rubbing of the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Chapel sistine.

As in the first act of creation, the bodies in Gorelova's works lack political creeds or preferred tastes, all their peculiar characteristics center on themselves. Each painting unfolds before the viewer like a dance of shape and color – the artist is inspired by the art of Matisse, but her choreography is more modern and immersed in the physical capabilities of man. Outside of social, cultural or any other conventions, "the naked man on the bare earth" dreamed of by philosophers, requires a meticulous and attentive consideration by the painter, capable of capturing the most subtle beat under the skin that changes the relief and the color. An unlimited plastic resource, which is the human body, is impossible to replace by works of scientific and technical progress.
Gorelova's works, unlike Frankenstein's experiments, are notable for the attention carefully transferred through her brush and pencil to every curve of the model.
The artist recomposes the man divided into parts by the art of modernism and history of the 20th century or, at least, gives us hope to believe that this recomposition is possible.
The exhibition is made up of four large works of three parts each, created in the year 2022. All develop an intense life of form and color that flows from figure to figure, giving each canvas its own emotional vibration. Narrow and vertical canvases became a characteristic of Gorelova's art, as well as wide and elongated diagonals that capture the viewer's gaze, lead it imperiously, emphasizing each triceps and all the tension of the musculature. His talent exists on a wide and truly modern fingerboard, where he moves freely between antiquity, mannerism and the 20th century. Now Gorelova turns more and more to the Italians of the 17th century – whimsical and presumptuous: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo and the gallery of Fontainebleau Rosso Fiorentino serve as plastic resource.
Selecting the best of the Renaissance, dissecting the body in expressionism or deconstructing it in surrealism, the artist always aspires to the new. Gorelova acts within the postmodern set of images: it is very natural to see in the painting a hand or a leg of a Renaissance character but treated to purity with the acid of surrealism. The fluidity of pictorial forms is comparable to Leonora Carrington's ambiguous and magical characters, and Georgia O'Keeffe's female anatomy of flowers. Feet and wrists are refined, lengthened, multiplied, they begin to live their lives despite any realism. The movement is broken down into many stages, but these nudes do not go down the stairs, on the contrary – the dying figures climb over each other. One wonders, where does all this take place – perhaps in Dante's “Inferno”?
Passionate about the structure of the bodies and the movement of the paint on the canvas, the artist inadvertently solves the most complex problem of “message”, or traditional media consecrated by history. The figures in his paintings appear so variegated that they evoke sociological concepts of "crowd" and "crowd." Corporeality, which in recent decades has become one of the main problems and themes of art, thus reaches its maximum expression. Now the emotions are intense to the point of unbearable and in all their fullness they are transmitted not by the individualization of the faces, but by the same depersonalized bodies. The complex plastic work meticulously worked by the artist is capable of easily producing rhetorical formulas known since Baroque times. Gorelova manages to dig them out of the layers of cultural memory buried dangerously close to the surface of human existence and that separate personality from nothingness. It is not just the depths of the subconscious that so appealed to Surrealist artists, but the fine line that separates man from the beast within. Gorelova learned well the lesson of the art that extended throughout the 20th century together with expressionists, evidence of which is the very intense chromatic harmony of the paintings. The viewer who is in front of these paintings can be shocked or scared, facing millions of momentary questions about his body that do not even reach his consciousness: "Is this me?" What the artist draws is confronted and compared with the receptacle of the personality inherent in the human being, the muscular layer of a unique consciousness – here is the focus and paradox of verisimilitude. The human body continues to be a universal image capable of explaining everything, especially if it is made with the internal care typical of Gorelova's painting. The well-known philosophical and psychological problem “The Self and the Other” takes on a new aspect.

Pavel Gerasimenko