Lesha Petrov

About

The works on view are made in the technique of paper collage, using visual attributes of op art, science fiction, and psychedelic culture.

The tropes that can be recognized in my works are built around existential and cosmogonic subjects. These include images of infants and adults in the fetal position, black holes and wormholes, reverse evolution, and the cosmic vacuum in which geometric abstractions hang.

The set of images and details for the collage in this case is detached from popular culture. There are no specific personalities, events, or symbols of modern history. Materials for the work I find in old scholarly books and journals, whose tone of images remains neutral and even detached.

The work ranges in size from the classic poster size to miniature, as if telescopically reduced formats of 3x5cm.

These factors create a kind of impenetrability, an airtightness to my art. And it seems that the shades of psychedelic revelation and fear of the cosmos are a consequence not of the impossibility, but of the desire to speak of the transcendent.