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The Tortures of Cupid
In the series “The Tortures of Cupid,” I consciously work with absurdity and kitsch as a form of collective visual memory. I am interested in the aesthetics of images that once functioned as myths for everyday life: carpets behind the driver’s seat in 'marshrutkas', wall tapestries in garage cooperatives, interiors where images of deer, forests, and animals hung alongside magazines with idealized female bodies.
These images shaped a primitive yet sincere imagination of beauty, desire, strength, and love. They were our first myths - simplified, hyperbolized, often vulgar, yet deeply emotional. In this environment, eroticism, nature, and heroism coexisted without hierarchy, merging into a strange, kitschy but recognizable universe.
In my works, I deliberately combine this “low” visual tradition with more refined, historically canonical image structures. Ornamentality, rhythm, and decorativeness remind me of another type of visual myth — one that existed within the European tradition, particularly in the aesthetics of William Morris, where nature transformed into an endless pattern and beauty became a form of escape from reality.
This contrast - between the garage carpet and decorative utopia, between crude desire and refined form - becomes the key field of tension within the series.
In my interpretation, Cupid is not a romantic symbol of love, but a body trapped between these two types of myth. He is born from desire, yet constantly tortured by the images that produce that desire. His torment is the collision between idealized love and the kitschy, consumerist, imposed fantasy that shaped our imagination of intimacy long before real experience.
Absurdity and deliberate visual excess here become tools not of irony, but of revelation: I do not mock these images - I restore their power as archaic, naïve, yet remarkably enduring myths.
