Fear, 2011

Vladimir Kolosov   Emerging artists

"Fear" is one of Vladimir Kolosov's more distilled and psychologically charged works. Unlike many of his paintings populated with travellers, strange creatures, or metaphysical landscapes, this composition reduces fear to its essential visual language: darkness, instability, and the confrontation between two unknown presences. 

This piece includes fear itself and its victim. 

The large luminous form dominates the upper part of the composition. It appears simultaneously celestial and organic - a passage to unknown, a consciousness emerging from darkness. It is not perfectly circular but disturbed by violent red intrusions. The whiteness in its centre suggests illumination, while the surrounding reds and blacks introduce danger and instability.

Below it floats a smaller orb. Unlike the larger form, it possesses something resembling a face - a mouth opened in astonishment and two dark voids that may be eyes. It becomes possible to read the relationship between these forms as:

Consciousness confronting the unknown.

The ambiguity is important because fear itself is ambiguous. It rarely possesses a clearly defined object.

The Emotional constituent of this piece emphasized by colours. The painting is constructed upon four principal colours: Black - the infinite unknown; White - consciousness and revelation; Red - danger, pain, anxiety and intrusion; Blue-violet - melancholy, uncertainty and transition.

Notice that the black is never entirely black. It is populated by hidden blues, purples and reds. Fear similarly is seldom singular. Anxiety is usually composed of memories, anticipation, imagination and uncertainty. The red appears like fissures breaking through the white surfaces. It does not merely decorate the composition—it wounds it.

This piece reflects the Movement of Fear: there is no stable horizon. The dark currents connect both circular forms suggesting that fear is contagious or transmissible. The larger sphere appears to release streams of darkness which descend toward the smaller one. It symbolizes the emotional inheritance, transformation when subconscious thoughts becoming conscious, and the inevitability of confronting one's own anxieties.

The artist avoids calling the painting "Terror," "Horror," or "Panic." He chooses "Fear" - the most fundamental human emotion. It exists simultaneously: in memory, in anticipation, in imagination, and in physical experience.

The painting transforms an abstract psychological condition into a visual dialogue between light and darkness, vulnerability and immensity. Fear becomes not an event but a relationship - between the known and the unknowable. In that case the title that might serve as an epigraph for the work could be: "Fear is the conversation between what we understand and what forever remains beyond our sight."