Artist Dmitry Kolistratov wrote “Habitat” like an unmade film

Viewers were invited to enter a picturesque freeze-frame

The exhibition “Habitat” has opened in the “Fine Art” gallery. The painting by the author of the series, Dmitry Kolistratov, is very cinematic. The feeling that the landscapes and interiors he painted, where recognizable reality mixes with incredible fantasy, are freeze frames from an unmade film. It seems that a drama or a comedy is about to unfold in this space, and the artist caught a second before the start of the action.

The trick is that we will never know what kind of story can play out on a rooftop with bee hives, on a Matisse mirror chair, or at a high-rise building with a built-in slide for extreme skiing. But you can come up with your own plot, enter the freeze frame and become the hero of the picture.

“Each work is like a freeze-frame from which you can develop your own story,” says Marina Obraztsova, owner of the gallery, to MK. – Each viewer is invited to fantasize the landscape, imagine themselves in it, immerse themselves in the atmosphere, find their ideal habitat.

Each painting by Dmitry Kolistratov is with augmented reality. As a basis, the artist takes a real place (or the canvas of another artist) and changes it so that it acquires a cinematic illusion. Distinguishing reality from fantasy is sometimes quite difficult, so almost every work turns into a puzzle.

Here, for example, is a view of the Rossiya Hotel, which was demolished 13 years ago. The canvas looks almost like a retro-style photograph, but if you look closely, you will notice an oddity: the windows of the hotel are turned into lines, and lined up in a “fading” rhythm. At first they go in frequent stripes, but the farther from us, the fewer rows of gaps.

Or here is a very real house on Mayakovka. Only from the upper floors of the Soviet skyscraper long slides stretch to the ground, riding on which will surely take your breath away even from inveterate stoics.

But the city-garden on the roof of a city house – booths for bees are installed here. Before us, on the one hand, the idea that many artists and architects of the early twentieth century dreamed about, on the other hand, the real practice, which in recent years has been increasingly implemented. But while the city-garden is still a dream, not available to everyone. Would you like to be on such a roof?

Each picture is a kind of backdrop for a selfie. Only wider – standing in front of the paintings, you should choose your own and imagine yourself inside the one where you are most comfortable. Each freeze frame is a space for meditation.

You can go back to childhood – at the exhibition, an entire wall is devoted to paintings with bright toys, books laid out in mysterious cards, or frames where the focus is very large on the smallest objects of the children’s world that create their own special Universe. We all come from childhood, the artist is sure, and from time to time it is useful to return to it, finding our comfortable habitat there.

Many stories are transferred to familiar works of art. Here, for example, is Kolistratov’s version of Yury Pimenov’s painting “Morning Moscow”. Only there is no girl driving an open-top car. We find ourselves in an empty cabin of a Soviet car and can easily imagine ourselves in the driver’s seat.

And here is a painting based on the “Chair” by Henri Matisse. Only the chair is double – mirrored, one grows out of the other. In this picture, you are, as it were, inside an optical illusion.

– The figurative system of painting is built on the creation of the universal from the personal. In cinematography, even auteur cinema, this process goes in the opposite direction,” says Timofei Smirnov, curator of the exhibition. “Kolistratov’s painting is like suspense, in every frame-picture something must happen or something has already happened. The silence of the “freeze frame” and the imaginary emptiness of his canvases are like a cure for the lack of serotonin and boredom. It depicts the habitat of a person, a lyrical hero. Urban spaces and interiors are the embodiment of his (hero’s) thoughts. Behind the façade of reality lies the metaphysics of space. This world of intense energy of human existence and its (man’s) man-made environment – represented in Dmitry Kolistratov’s painting cannot be compared with the real world, but that’s why it is fictional. And who said that painting is not an illusion or someone else’s film?