Thunder and Lightning 2019

Curator: Andrey Remnev’s "Thunder and Lightning," an oil painting from 2019, strikes me immediately. It has this disconcerting serenity. Editor: Disconcerting is right. I'm intrigued by the contrast between the soft color palette and the unsettling composition. There's a dreamlike quality, yet something about it feels very… controlled. Curator: Absolutely. We have this triad of female figures whose bodies, in their planes, bisect differing landscapes: a sun-drenched rolling plain, a clouded cityscape, and a blinding shaft of light, all under the watch of black, stylized birds. How does it make you feel to position a patriarchal society reflected within the body and perspective of a figure that may feel powerless? Editor: It really messes with traditional landscape and portrait conventions. Usually, we see figures *within* a landscape, but here, the landscape is literally within them, or rather, they are the landscape. It raises questions about embodiment and the internalization of place, or perhaps it's a comment on societal architecture? The figure literally carrying these buildings as part of themselves. Curator: That relationship between internal and external worlds seems central, particularly considering Remnev’s clear command of both Surrealist and Academic approaches to painting. What impact do you think the birds introduce? Editor: They disrupt the stillness, don’t they? Suggesting movement, change, migration perhaps. They're a small detail, yet they draw the eye, these seemingly free elements punctuating the very static scene. And it calls to mind the long legacy of birds depicted in flight in ancient and modern depictions of Greek mythology. Curator: Yes, or considering the work within feminist art history, a kind of surrealist critique of idealized female representation, fractured and reassembled in ways that reveal the constructed nature of identity. Editor: I think bringing Remnev’s visual strategies into view encourages visitors to really interrogate how environments are created and controlled through social conditions, politics, and our gaze. Curator: Indeed. Thinking through how he blends this range of painterly strategies pushes the visitor to recognize what perspectives are lost, or deliberately obscured.