Andrey Gorbunov is continuing the search for a realistic visual language. He develops images that illustrate several themes and topics that run through his art. They may be unappealing to certain viewers, since Gorbunov uses anatomical motifs in his pictures. His canvases are memorable as painstakingly drawn with the pink puffiness, appendages, and pieces of internal organs that are familiar to us from the anatomy textbooks of our schooldays. These physiological fantasies often appear on his canvases in a jeering, showy, glamorous glossy tint, predisposing to the artist those who expect not grace and reflection from art, but aggression and obsessive concentration.
“Render” is a collage experiment that continues the anatomical variations that have brought fame to Gorbunov. The canvases are pasted with pages from old medical publications and anatomy textbooks. In black marker, they are drawn over with figures of mother and child, faces, emblems used in tattoos, and skulls with grotesque grinning physiognomies that blink on internet banner ads to entice overly-preoccupied users. The drawings partially imitate the painstakingly naïve style of a tattoo. In certain works, there are scenes from the art of the German Renaissance. Others are drafted by the rules of 3D graphics. We don’t see the image itself, but its carcass: the traced grid of a face, the angular framework of hills, or the silhouette of an emblem. These fantasies, deliberately executed as sketches, are arranged in the anatomical motifs habitual for the paintings of Gorbunov.
The collaged canvases are thickly lacquered. Under the varnish, the textbook pages yellow, aging both the drawings stylized as computer graphics, and the flamboyant enlarged tattoos. Gorbunov locks the image in a transitional state, mixing a 3D picture sketch with a tattoo on skin. Varnish dresses these worthless forms in an organic shell. Varnish creates a screen to show these images that are familiar and accessible to everyone. “Render” broadcasts fragments of phantasms, which do not fit either thematically or stylistically into ideas of what is proper to represent in a picture. However, this series of works does not have the ideology characteristic of the collages of the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Constructivists, destroying the traditional visual form and reducing the image to a record of spontaneous psychological processes, ridiculing the bourgeoisie and political elite or illustrating utopian myths. The artist, in this case, does not distance himself from his material. The recombination of ordinary uncensored visual experience is what creates the realism of Andrey Gorbunov.