The Triangle Gallery is pleased to present "Civilizations", the new personal exhibition of paintings by Alexander Pogorzhelsky (b. in 1980 in Moscow, lives and works in Milan, Italy).

The exhibition features new paintings that continue the artist’s long-standing practice. At the heart of the project is a world where motifs from different eras and cultures are freed from their familiar historical context, coalescing into a single, continuously changing environment.

Alexander Pogorzhelsky has long and consistently turned to the art of ancient civilizations. Depictions of animals and plants, ornaments, fragments of ceramics and reliefs serve as his starting point in creating his own visual universe. Here, these elements gradually change their outlines, flow into one another, and form a mutable landscape that exists beyond the usual logic of time.

In these works, the past is not opposed to the present. Rather, it is integrated into a single stream where the very need to separate the ancient and the contemporary disappears. The emerging forms seem to exist in several dimensions at once: while preserving echoes of the distant past, they simultaneously face the future.

Painting itself plays a special role in creating this sensation. The space of the canvases is filled with air and light, while the figures appear to emerge through transparent layers of color only to dissolve into them again. Subtle gradations of hues, a composition devoid of rigid boundaries, and an almost weightless texture produce an effect of shimmer, lightness, and continuous movement.

Each work unfolds in its own color intonation, reminiscent of the changing time of day or a state of nature. The palette here does not so much organize the composition as shape the atmosphere — quiet, fluid, barely perceptible. It is precisely this atmosphere that transforms the pictorial space into a place where cultural memory breaks free from temporal boundaries and continues to live in the endless movement of images.

This freedom in handling form and the fusion of diverse cultural sources align Alexander Pogorzhelsky’s painting with the artistic explorations of the early 20th century. “This includes Bakst and Benois with their theatrical costumes and set designs, Ivan Puni, Lyubov Popova, and Goncharova with their search for a new artistic language, and Konstantin Somov with his interest in the antique, yet in a new interpretation,” the artist notes. This affinity manifests itself in the very view of the past, for which the ancient is a living, not yet exhausted form, open to new readings.

The artist’s method is based not on recording what is seen, but on trusting memory and the inner experience of the moment. The initial impression undergoes an internal transformation, freeing itself from the incidental and acquiring a new poetics of color and form. Thus, an artifact becomes an image, and an image becomes a state.