Georgy LeontyevGeorgy Leontyev

In the painting “Complicated lady” I (as in the entire series of works) used the symbolic image of a “glossy beautiful stranger”, this was done to maximize the aesthetics of man as the “crown of creation” and at the same time to celebrate the unnatural ideality of this beauty. The mentioned image should embody the external world of a person, his manifestation. To visualize the inner world, I turn to the archetypal images of the forest and the wolf, which represent the unknown and fear, respectively. I want to emphasize how people are fanatical about achieving external beauty, but at the same time, they are completely unwilling to address the emptiness within, to understand themselves, and to overcome their hidden fears.

«Tangled up», the second piece in the series, inherits the symbolism of its predecessor. Here, I still appeal to the beauty of the human body, but I also add the theme of the duality of human nature and the ambiguous role that innovation plays in people’s lives. In terms of the theme of duality, I use surreal imagery to show that even in such a beautiful and perfect “container” as the human body, there is an element of cruelty, an archaic legacy of the animal kingdom that humans once belonged to and still partially belong to. The red silhouettes of automatic weapons serve as metaphorical symbols for me to illustrate the ingenuity of the human mind, which, unfortunately, is mostly directed towards creating tools of control and pressure through acts of violence. The work also features images of a smartphone and wires, which I use as symbols to demonstrate the modern human’s dependence on gadgets and social media.