«Benthos»
I’m not an optometrist, I’m a nuclear scientist, because I should examine every atom. Look at these photos – they are dirty, dirt creates poetry, it gives the art quality.
Miroslav Tichý
How is life possible out of reach of air and light, at the bottom where neither human sight nor sunshine come to? The artist Zhenya Mironov applies through his art to the subject of research of the abyssal life according to benthos – the set of organisms living on and in the ground of water reservoirs. Basing on the Greek term as the central metaphor, the artist constructs his own scheme of real inner life, non-obvious and underestimated.
Mironov’s works are executed in a unique technique. Imprinting his subjects at the abandoned peateries, the artist saturates them with oil, covers the paper surface with peat and lacquer, then putting the object down to the bottom of a peat bog. The artist’s travel is going on across one of the largest peat bogs in Europe – Orshinsky Mokh, the mysticism of which imparts features of a real guide to the inner world of a human and things to the piece of art. Practicing reclusion rather than in physical, as in spiritual form, Zhenya Mironov was conducting his research within eight years. The material and the notional final of it has become the true reaching of the bottom of the lake – the benthos, which turned out to be the symbolic act of transpersonal exit to the absolute reality of self-being.
Contraposing the outside, assertive energy of the modern industrial world to the hidden deep energy of peat, the result of the centuries-old decay of single lives, the artist aspires to overcome the image of the photograph as an unreflecting multiple replication of shapes and to return to it her features as a magical instrument, fixing the hidden sense of the world around, bypassing ready-made philosophical and cultural concepts. «My task is not in creating pieces of art, which are identified with beauty. I want to reveal the understanding of fragility of life, of our intellection, perception and simultaneous gratuitous brave giving of ourselves to the whole world, – the artist says. – Van Gogh, Miroslav Tichý practically quitted travelling physically not by accident. Their works are the exhortation to begin stepping paths to the inside of oneself…»
Leaving the familiar images of physical objects, the author enters (and lets the spectator to enter) the unknown space of the deep immersion where the habitual patterns of the world around are breaking, giving way to their true nature.