Dmitry Okruzhnov and Maria Sharova – Russian art duet. The artists have been working together since 2012.
Our workshop was located in a dilapidated house of culture an old constructivist building from the USSR’s time. Before our eyes, the huge building that personifies an entire era was being destroyed, literally falling apart. This decay and the current state of the post-internet is transforming our perception of reality. Hybrid images of a new visuality appear. The Internet and decay shape our optics of time and space. The condition is more important than a specific place, and time is nonlinear and multilayered. We find moments of contact between the networked everyday life and the reality, interaction and interpenetration with each other.
Painting is our main medium. We create a collage on the computer from photographs found on the Internet and all kinds of technical failures that represent the Internet ruins. Network photos should resonate with our senses and show the decaying habitats of modern people. Then we transfer the collage into painting, constantly layering painting fragments and particles on top of each other, which become a kind of noise. All the paintings are elaborated in details. All the fragments have different tactility: from smooth surfaces to rough, from blots of paint to small dots and dashes. It is important for us to achieve a sense of the fragility of space, its multi-layered nature. One fragment is replaced by another, thereby preventing the viewer reaching the bottom of the image. There is the transformation of figurative into abstract, and vice versa.