In the fantastic carnival world of swirling moments created by the mass media, painting often seems out of touch and limited by age-old, constricting mores.
St Petersburg-born artist Victor Borisov, whose exhibition at the State Museum of City Sculpture opens this Friday, trips the light fantastic as he confronts the challenge of making one of mankind's oldest arts new.
Pictures such as the enigmatically sensual "Night Roof," (pictured right) recreate the emotional tones of occasional events observed.
"I have no longing to become an authority," Borisov said.
"As the author I am quite content with the role of `prime viewer,' with the possibility to speak about what I see in my own language which, hopefully, everybody can understand."
Borisov responds to the flittering gaze of the contemporary viewer by excluding narrative thrust and fragments of dead nature with their distracting symbolic meanings.
Instead, Borisov concentrates on the clenched force of such postured figures as "Falling Down" and "Duel."
In the first of these, the flashing teeth of frozen furious wolves are posed between a bright, yellow sky and a solid, brown mountain. All of the picture's elements are unashamedly open for the perceiver's attention to play with, caress, or ignore.
Similarly, the protagonists in "Duel" could be friends clasping hands, lovers in a moment of intense passion, arm wrestlers in a bar, or any one of a thousand potential stories.
Visual perception in the now is formed by quasi-natural images -- television, cinematography, and print-media photography.
Contemporary perceptual systems intrinsic to every individual work automatically contradict specific cultural perceptions aiming at beauty, art, creativity, spirituality, and other abstract goals. They demand immediate recognition without any awareness of logical or associative links.
Contemporary painting does not share in the process of forming everyday perceptions; rather, fine art creations are deemed modern if they reflect the reflections of the mass media.
Borisov's clear outlines and visual density allow for a clean interplay between the figures postured on his canvases.
Painting today suffers from declining mass appeal because contemporary perceptions see art as more contaminated the closer it comes to reality, but the further from reality art is, the less interesting it becomes.
Borisov fascinates the viewer's perceptions with the harmony created between the subject, its depiction, and the artist's twirling rhythm of graceful strokes.
His delicately deliberate use of color, shade, and figure evokes primary emotions without sacrificing art to the perceptual contradictions of the late 20th century.