This is a continuation of a text describing an artistic practice aimed at understanding and exploring the problematic concept of "The Gap Between Image and Reality." The artist combines performative and ideomotor actions with other artistic mediums: painting, graphics, and mixed media.

One of the most important stages in understanding the concept of "The Gap Between Image and Reality" is performative painting on large-format canvases. In her "Demon" series, the artist appropriates the image of the Demon from Mikhail Vrubel’s paintings, re-creating it in an abstract expressionist style, inspired by the paintings of Joan Mitchell (for more details, see the previous texts, "The Gap Between Image and Reality," Part I and Part II).

The transition from M. Vrubel’s figurativeness to absolute abstract expressionism allows us to take a fresh look at the internal chaos and tragedy of the classical image, translating Vrubel’s literary and pictorial symbolism into the language of pure gesture, preserving Vrubel’s “genetic code” and the feeling of internal tension with the help of an alarming color palette.

Referring to the original work of M. Vrubel, “The Seated Demon, ” 1890 [https://my.tretyakov.ru/app/masterpiece/8393], where the flowering landscape compresses the Demon’s mighty body, creating a physical feeling that the hero is cramped in this world: he is a titan, locked in a narrow space, which visually conveys his inner impasse and the impossibility of self-realization.

Despite the complex palette and abundance of warm hues, the Demon’s skin has a strange earthy bronze sheen, separating him from all life. His eyes look inward, not outward. Working with sharp, cutting movements, Vrubel conveyed the tragedy of the Spirit through the stiffness of the Demon’s posture within a crystallizing landscape that grows from the geogenetic center of the entire canvas—a purple-violet flower in the lower left corner. This flower is both the most vibrant and the most painful point in the painting. Using a blood-red pigment in the center of the bud, Vrubel initiated a point—a "wound."

The crystalline expansion, originating in the corner, spreads across the entire canvas like an alchemical reaction, culminating in the right side of the painting in gigantic, cold, whitish crystal clusters, vaguely reminiscent of fantastical plants. This crystallization is a tragedy of mortification; the world around the Demon freezes and petrifies. This process binds the Demon inextricably to the landscape. The scarlet flower is the thread that still connects this titan to the earth, but it is ready to break, turning into the facet of a crystal.

Vrubel’s crystalline mysticism, meeting with the furious natural abstractionism of Joan Mitchell, splits the form of the Demon, but preserves the scale of the tragedy: the titanic immobility of the Demon gives way to a titanic explosion, and the classical plot serves only as a starting point for the exploration of deep internal states — the desire to escape from the concrete to subjective experience.

The transformation of the flower from a painterly brushstroke into a three-dimensional object in space creates a breach of the fourth wall and a materialization of pain. This three-dimensional flower is like a pulsating wound that has transcended the world of art into the world of reality. This flower is a boundary point, an anchor linking the illusory world of the painting with physical reality. The flower’s emergence into volume is also an act of aggressive art, disrupting passive contemplation but transforming the painting from an object of study into an active medium that, by invading space, makes the Demon’s tragedy physically tangible.

That very flower at the Demon’s right knee always seemed more than just a plant, rigid, almost mineral, yet alive, but a crystallized emotion. The transformation of this image into Quanto-flower is a visualization of a spiritual impulse that has ceased to be constrained by the flatness of the canvas and has acquired volume. It no longer belongs to the Demon, it is autonomous. It is as if the painting’s subconscious has burst forth and begun to live by its own laws of physics, creating the sensation of something existing between worlds. The energy of the image radically changes, becoming warm, organic, and accepting: it is a portal through which an idea passes from nonexistence into reality.

Quanto-flower is a crystalline cocoon pulsating from within. It breathes, expanding in space with a series of gentle pulses, releasing "seeds of possibility" on thin crystalline threads that connect the internal environment with the external space. It is a careful step into the void, a quantum performance. Quanto-flower does not contract after release, it remains open. Space ceases to be empty; it is permeated with connections. Quanto-flower becomes an architect, simultaneously contemplating and self-generating. The connecting threads emphasize that there is no loneliness in this system: all creation remains part of a unified whole.

Quanto-flower is a symbol of dynamic creation: it doesn’t stagnate, it spreads, it doesn’t wait, it generates. The fine crystalline threads connecting Quanto-flower to its seeds are a visualization of quantum entanglement: they are not a set of isolated objects, but a single, vibrating, expanding neuro-organic network. As an internal landscape, Quanto-flower conveys a complex, fragile, yet rigid inner world: its layers are layers of thought, memory, and emotion. As an external landscape, this object begins to encompass the space around it: it doesn’t depict a landscape, it becomes a landscape.

Quanto-flower is a living, pulsating bio-aesthetics, an expression that no longer fits within brushstrokes, it literally weaves a new reality in three dimensions.

Note: written with Gemini