Spellbound

Milan, 7th August 2024. On Tuesday, 17 September 2024, the artist Vladimir Kartashov (born in Novosibirsk in 1997) presents Spellbound, his 8^th personal exhibition, in the space of the Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani.

Influenced by a variety of iconographic traditions, mythologies, and oneiric dimensions, the Russian artist sets out to explore the increasingly challenging evolution of the human condition in the digital era. His works, expressions of an incredibly poetic imagination and a vivid aesthetic sensitivity, position themselves at the junction of various visual traditions spanning from realism to symbolism and from surrealism to existentialism.

Kartashov’s signature sophisticated style is nurtured by multiple material and symbolic layers, which he employs to explore the universal themes of life and death, time and spirituality while probing into individual emotional realms and their relation to the inaccessible areas of the human psyche. His paintings at the intersection of the fantastic and the realistic oscillate between introspection and wonder.

The show at the Prometeo Gallery features large-scale canvases depicting lavish scenes populated by animals and fantastic creatures with concealed faces; vegetal elements provide spectacular backdrops brimming with symbols, emoticons, peculiar hyper realistic objects, and written codes; the resulting image is abundant to the point of overflowing.

The young artist’s paintings are lively and material, his brushstrokes alternating between gentle touches and thick layers—a technique that endows his canvases with depth and tactility at the same time, emphasising their physical presence and conferring a nearly sculptural dimension to the images.

According to the curator Domenico de Chirico, the resulting body of work is “a series of powerful and enigmatic visions engendering new pictorial heterotopies along the lines of the Foucauldian counter-sites, the non-spaces that provide societies with critical mirrors perceived as deviation scenarios, patterns of contestation or inversion of social and cultural conventions. There, the sacred and the profane, the beautiful and the grotesque, the heavenly and the infernal, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or in essence the good and the evil coexist in perfect eurhythmy”.

In Spellbound, Vladimir Kartashov transports the viewer into alternative, highly symbolic imaginary worlds, taking us on a visual and emotional journey of discovery into the deepest abysses of human experience.

The exhibition is created in collaboration with Tg residency established in Pietrasanta in 2022 with the aim to promote contemporary artists and enable artistic production based on the unique resources of the local marble quarries, bronze foundries, ceramic kilns, and spacious studios. Tg residency organises solo and group shows across the world, working together with galleries and high-profile art institutions.