The solo exhibition by Mikhail Kaban-Petrov features works from different art series and time periods. The selection is united not only by the principle of a graphic frontier, or a collision line, presented in each work (whether the horizon line, a fault in the ground or a crack in a loaf of bread), but also by the painful sense of time gap, loss of natural link with the past, and destruction of the existing world view. This disturbing feelings, according to the curators, are the artist’s fundamental inspiration source.

For the past decades Mikhail Kaban-Petrov has been living away from big cities and urban centers, drawing his formal subjects and deep symbolism in earthy and agricultural lifestyle. Both seclusion and social phobia result in inevitable contemplation and temporary vacuum, lack or absence movement, and, omission of any human figures.

The author says that he depicts not the objects of everyday life, but rather things-in-themselves — the ‘logos’ that can be revealed only through contemplation and renunciation of the worldliness. The artist is very thin-skinned to the fact that the high speed changes in modern human lives, and constant mutation of visual and mental environment, cause loss of human fundamental values. Hence the desire to stop the time and find the opportunity to see the essence of things. Such ‘stops’ inevitably create time gaps, separating the self-concentrated world of art from the rapidly “stealing reality”.

Elizaveta Zelchenko