KARIK & VALYA

Alexander Zakharov is surrounded by a vibrant artistic scene: enormous formats, three- and four-dimensional images, everything in motion, an endless supply of new media that artists young and old are stubbornly trying to exhaust and master, but technology is on the verge of overtaking them. Today, the viewer’s eye and consciousness are assaulted by complex multimedia projects; we are ready to easily perceive simultaneously auditory, visual, and sensory information. And here, Alexander Zakharov displays lacquer miniatures, executed in a traditional technique, which demand careful observation, awakening in us, unaccustomed to serious subjects, a childlike excitement, a fascination with "what's next" and "how will it end?"

Time gave the artist Zakharov a pocket, somehow incomprehensibly protecting him, and between the squat on Furmanny Lane (where Zakharov once got his start), America, and today's Moscow, serious art lives in a toy format. Two small characters, Karik and Valya, taken from a book by Yan Larry, travel among enormous, tropical-looking plants and insects, adapting the giants into swings and hammocks, and escaping from monstrous praying mantises, antlions, and dragonflies with wingspans as long as airplanes. The wild vegetation in Zakharov's miniatures is, of course, of heavenly origin – here we find Milton-esque fragrant groves, where "the lush trunks ooze fragrant balsam and resin...," thickets from Rousseau's paintings of the Customs Officer, and Dutch floral still lifes that inspire reflection on the divine generosity and wisdom of the order of existence.

His works possess another important quality: the "super-dense" surface — airless, hermetically sealed, and maximally concentrated. They are like a fine digital source file of thousands of pixels, stretched out over tens of meters. Wonderful adventures can acquire a totality of action, strangely competing with reality, or at least creating a parallel flow not so far removed from Werther’s attack of love for the world, which opened Goethe’s hero’s microscopic vision when he discerned thousands of blades of grass and sensed the "breath of the All-Loving One."