Alexander Ossipov (TOTUR) creates intricately detailed oil paintings that touch on the suggestive universality of Jungian archetypes. Combining images that seem both divine and earthly, sociological and ritualistic, Ossipov often stylizes his chosen subject-matter, parsing it out into geometric blocks and mosaics of color. An extremely time-consuming and difficult process, Ossipov acknowledges that any one of his works could take months or years to complete; every detail, however miniscule, is important in relationship to the whole. 

The almost holographic perfection Ossipov is known to realize comes clearly to light in the oil on canvas work Association with Pasternak. Here, a face functions as the work’s organizing principle; and all the other details in the painting work to provide its emotional subtext. The many ribbons of color that compose the painting lend the face an almost digital aspect, as though it were crystallizing into a not-yet-realized shape before viewers’ eyes. This atmosphere of a work ever in the process of becoming makes the painting’s central theme (the face of the Russian poet Boris Pasternak) something everlasting rather than historically localized.