Vitaly Barabanov on the exhibition "Gardens of Daffodils", mirrors and how our memory transforms nature

The path of an artist is a very large, systematic, daily and consistent work. One of my teachers said that the work of an artist is no longer physical, but mental. But I would like to say that the physical component of work is also huge. It is difficult to talk about your creative path, because I believe that a good artist should be considered after 20-30 years of his work, where his stages of creativity, methodology of work and change of mediums are consistently visible. Although I've been painting constantly since I was 4-5 years old, after graduating from art school, art college, Academy and Institute of Contemporary Art, having studied various techniques and methods of work, I consider the conscious beginning of the path of a modern artist since 2014. It was in 2014 that I began to have income from my works. But I think that from the moment I entered art school, I already realized that I was going to be an artist. I remember my first teacher saying when he saw my workplace in the studio — well, look, everyone is in order and everything is in its place, but Barabanov has some kind of order and chaos that only he understands - he will probably be a real artist.

The first full-fledged solo exhibition was in 2015 and was called "Red 0.5" under the curatorship of Ayana Chigzhit. In the spring of 2015, the artist-run-space Krasny Center on Krasny Oktyabr was formed, of which I was a member from the moment of its foundation until its closure in 2017. Many great artists participated in this association, such as Anton Kushaev, Irina Petrakova, Ivan Novikov, Denis Koshkarev, Sasha Gorelikov and many others. The center had two rooms — one shared large workshop and an exhibition hall. Exhibition projects were opened there about once every two weeks. And my project, studying the nature of painting, was a reflection on this association and how independent venues were opposed to commercial galleries. From the moment of the first exhibition at the Center, I came to the space the day after the opening of each exhibition and drew my way through the exposition with a white canvas on the floor. Thus, each canvas could capture a certain relief and absorbed everything that was on the floor. The result was an abstract canvas created as a result of action painting.

When our site was six months old, I put up 11 canvases and a photo of one canvas, which at that time was on display in the Garage, which was doing a big project about self-organization. That is, such a fixation of one's own route during 12 projects in the exhibition space during the six months of the Center's existence. This was partly inspired by a conversation with a gallery owner who said that he was not going to exhibit young artists and they could only clean the floor in his gallery. Subsequently, the same medium was used in the "Plein-air Practices" project in 2016 at the Osnova gallery, where I explored the nature of painting and recorded my walks with my dog outdoors.

In 2018, in parallel with the experiments on creating a "living work" and "action painting", I began to work directly with visual art. As a result of these searches, the Perfect decay project was born in 2021. Here I explored the relationship between my psychoemotional states and the memory of places where I have been, and where I return from time to time in my imagination. In these "journeys", I tried to listen to the changing states of nature and wanted to feel at the same time its cyclicity and impermanence. As a result, this led to the "disintegration" of the image, the inability to fix its stable state. Actually, based on this work, I began to try to call my inner reality "nature." It is fundamentally important for me to emphasize here that when creating images, I work exclusively with the space of the "inner" – the territory where imagination and memory can only meet.

This is why I deliberately do not use the image transfer to the canvas from the photo. I believe that photography is a dead nature, just a moment stopped by the camera shutter, whereas my goal in the Perfect Decay project was to capture and present to the viewer the process itself, with its inherent dynamics.

Later, in the "Make garden great again" project, I formed the concept of a "Garden" as my inner self-portrait, every day when I created a work where I viewed my condition through a fragment of a landscape or even plants. According to the laws of the medium in the project, each work must be started and finished on the same day in order to capture my "inner nature" and psycho-emotional state on that day. Now the "Garden" is a kind of construct from different fragments of landscapes, which I combine into an "ideal nature" and which conveys my state in the process of creation.

The project in the Garage in 2021 was called "An Unexpected Episode". The exhibition was dedicated to the coronavirus. In 2019, during the first quarantine in Moscow, I couldn't get into the workshop for several months. I was faced with the fact that, as if in a TV series, our lives suddenly moved online. Before the quarantine in the studio, I was engaged in a project that continued research on creating a "living work" — and when I could not visit the workshop and "take care" of the canvases, they dried up and were preserved.

For the Garage, I took the largest of these canvases and made an installation out of it, where it seems as if the canvas falls from the wall and dissolves into a puddle of black mirrored surface, as if the painting goes online and is reflected in the mirrored surface. Actually, it was the moment of acquaintance with the mirror and the beginning of studying the optics of artists, as if it were my personal "black mirror of Klodt". I applied for an open call with this project and became one of the project participants. I am very grateful to the Garage Museum team for their help in implementing this important project for me.

The mirror surface turned out to be attractive to me because in Daffodil Gardens, with its help, in addition to reflecting on the role of nature and directly seeing the landscape in the digital age, I tried to lay a critical vector in relation to works of art and museums. Unfortunately, many visitors now use the latter more often as a backdrop for photo shoots and their own self-presentation on social networks. Actually, this is where the title refers to the myth of Narcissus. Plus, with the help of painting on mirrors, the viewer can stand directly in the author's place and try to understand his "inner nature" from the inside.

Since I position my memory as not perfect, at the moment of working on a work, I wash away or dissolve those fragments that I cannot convey due to the changing image and my own condition. There is a connection between the ever-changing nature, its image and my changing moods. I started doing this at Perfect decay and have now brought it to an independent medium by studying the abilities of pigments, binders and how they interact with the canvas. It also seems to me that this technique helps me solve the problem of "flatness" in a painting. Using this medium on a mirrored surface, I see myself reflected in those fragments where the colorful layer dissolves — which adds even more volume and planning to the painting.

In my visual projects, I basically do not work with photography, as I consider photography to be "dead nature", and for me it is very important to work with my memories, impressions of specific natural places and my changing states. And actually, with the psychologism of the landscape. I also directly associate the landscape with my inner self-portrait at the time of the creation of the work. Therefore, I do not work en plein air, where being affected by nature, I will not be able to work with my inner self.