Alexey Terenin

Alexey Terenin luckily combines the architect’s training and painter’s practice in his work, which embraces the beautiful environment of modern man. 
 

Having got the education at the Moscow Architectural Institute in 1986-1993 Alexey Terenin started his career of exhibiting graphic artist and painter in 1992 with most prominent Moscow galleries Art Moderne and M’ARS. 
 

Grown-up in Prague and living in Moscow he as an artist has become a digger for the layers of imagination that can never be identified historically but absorbed the heritage of many cultures of the West and East. The language of reminiscence and association chosen by the artist enabled him to build up a big city of dreams inhabited with the ghosts of the past and heroes of the present most peculiarly and unpredictably. In the depths of his fantasy, the artist was given a power to choose the time, the place and the rules of the game and then to set off on a journey with his personages. 
 

Prague undoubtedly inspired Terenin’s “Gothic” expressiveness, while Moscow gave him the constant sense of interlacement of epochs, that history’s masquerade, which is naturally present in his paintings. The artist found his way of discovering the world. A mask, instead of concealing and hiding the meanings, became a sign, a symbol, and an image of reality, which otherwise in this way or another escapes our comprehension, and only the mask provides us the understanding of the theater of life.
 

Not accidentally Terenin worked for the theater, the Bolshoj Theater of Moscow. The scenery may serve the important world for his work, be it an interior mural, easel painting, or furniture design. There is no literature, no subject, but only a situation. The narration is left up to some unknown and independent playwright. The abovementioned pictorial journey endeavored by Terenin’s personages can be only possible if the artist and the viewer know nothing about the end of it. Also, the attaching of meanings and titles is in discord with the nature of the game. What we have for sure is the perfect architectonics of the newly discovered world that anyone could probably have seen in some other life.