THE FRONT NEVER ENDED.
YOU ARE STILL INSIDE IT
Paintings, portraits, prose and long-form historical construction.
BETRETEN DER STADT IST VERBOTEN!
The enclosure holds:
You Are Still Inside It is a long-form, research-driven body of work centered on Stalingrad and the Eastern Front of the Second World War.
This project does not illustrate history. It constructs a historical interior — a parallel psychic architecture distilled from real events, real images, and real human lives.
Stalingrad does not behave like a normal battle. It feels less like an event than like a sealed reality: unfinished, unresolved, saturated with millions of suspended human narratives.
The figures in this work are not symbols. They are not heroes. They are not arguments. They are presences.
This is a work about what remains.
On the impossibility of not doing this:
I do not make this work because I decided to. I make it because my existence feels tied to it. I cannot fully explain why. It feels less like choice than necessity.
I have lived inside history since childhood. But among everything I have studied, the Eastern Front — and Stalingrad in particular — stands apart as an anomaly: a vast field of unfinished human narratives, unresolved situations, and broken continuities.
It does not feel like a normal historical episode. It feels like a rupture that never fully closed.
On the impossibility of not doing this:
Why Stalingrad?:
Stalingrad is not only the largest documented battle in human history. It is also one of the strangest. Literally a Fortean event in its breadth within all human history.
It behaves like a closed macrocosm of staggeringly complex creation — a world with its own gravity, sentiments , terms, places pressures, and internal logic. It exists simultaneously as historical event and as a permanent psychological structure in human memory, and also as something more uncanny than either: a fracture or flux in time that resists assimilation.
In this work, Stalingrad is the gravitational center. If the Eastern Front is seen as encompassing that center . The men within it are its matter.
On the Choice of Subjects:
I am drawn almost exclusively to the unknown: the nameless, the encircled, the imprisoned, the already half-erased.
I am not interested in those whose lives have already been stabilized by history. I am interested in those whose stories remain suspended, unresolved, and in many cases, unlived to their own awareness.
Often, especially in the case of prisoners, the subject likely never saw the photograph that now remains of him. That disjunction — between existence and its trace — is not incidental. It is one of the moral centers of the work.
Selection Process:
I am drawn almost exclusively to the unknown: nameless soldiers, prisoners, the encircled, the already half-erased.
I am not interested in generals, officers, or known historical figures. Those lives are already stabilized by narrative.
The unknown are different. Their stories remain unresolved. In many cases, especially with prisoners, they likely never even saw the photograph that remains of them.
That incompleteness is not incidental. It is the psychological and ethical center of the work.
On the Nature of the Subjects:
The subjects are chosen through a recognitional, pre-verbal process. I move through hundreds of original period photographs — from scrapbooks, letters, archives, and private collections — and I know immediately when a figure is right.
It is not a matter of category or appearance. It is bodily, immediate, and unavoidable.
What They Are:
The figures are individuals. They are also witnesses. They also function as icons in the older sense: not symbols to be decoded, but presences to be encountered.
They exist in a liminal state — between document and apparition, between historical fact and timeless human condition.
The work insists on their singularity while allowing them to carry something larger than themselves.
ON TRANSFORMATION :
From Photograph to Painting-
The photograph functions only as a reagent.
When an image enters the work, it is not copied. It is displaced. Something is distilled, concentrated, and carried forward that cannot exist in the archive alone.
The painting is an act of resurrection, refraction, restoration, and preservation in a distilled light.
Working Method:
The process does not begin in language. It begins in a Jungian, pre-verbal register — a form of recognition that precedes explanation.
I do not choose this work so much as submit to it. The act of painting is a form of clarification and realignment: bringing an internal configuration into clearer focus.
Every formal decision — color, texture, movement, collage — is subject-specific. Each figure demands a different solution.
ETHICS & LIMITS:
What This Refuses and Refutes-
I refuse spectacle. I refuse heroization. I refuse fetishization, sentimentality, and morbidity-for-effect.
I refuse to project invented thoughts or slogans into people whose inner lives I cannot know.
I refuse to simplify this material for comfort or consumption.
I refuse liberal Western standards and political correctness,
On “Against Romanticizing”
Not romanticizing means refusing the language of cinema, myth, and emotional packaging.
It means allowing the subject to remain complex, unresolved, and resistant to easy use.
On War Imagery:
Most war imagery is still structured by propaganda, even when it pretends not to be.
It simplifies. It reassures. It selects a position.
With few exceptions since post–World War I
“Against Romanticizing”essionism, modern war art has laOn “Against Romanticizing”rgely abandoned psychological and existential complexity in favor of cultural comfort.
The Act of Clarification:
Position:
I am not approaching this as a historian or narrator.
My role is closer to that of a messenger or conductor: making a passage for something that cannot fully speak in its original form.
I am not speaking for these men. I cannot.
I am making space for them. The work is an act of illumination, not ventriloquism.
ON THE TITLE:
You are Still Inside It
names the encirclement—the Kessel—as both event and seperate anomalous time-space. At Stalingrad, enclosure was total: bodies, movement, language, interpretation. There was no exterior position from which meaning could be safely assembled. Everything occurred within managed albeit apocalyptic limits.
Looking does not place you outside the event.
It confirms your current position within it.
You Are Still Inside It is a long-form, research-driven body of work centered on the Eastern Front of the Second World War, with Stalingrad at its heart. This project does not attempt to illustrate history. It constructs a historical interior — a liminal place with its own gravity, scale, and internal logic. The Eastern Front never behaves like other theaters of war. It feels less like an event than a separate anomalous reality. This is my iteration of expressing and exploring this space through my multidisciplinary artistic studies and research.. Voicing what words alone can no speak for.
Catalogue
Selected Works
2023 — PRESENT Works are available for acquisition. Institutional and private commissions considered.
Encirclement.
reflections and refractions of those who remained.
ENCIRCLEMENT Portraits and groupings from inside the Stalingrad encirclement. The men depicted are taken from wartime photographs—often the only surviving visual record of their existence. In many cases, their names and fates are unknown. The paintings do not recreate I chose instead to illuminate. The individuals presence is what carry’s through . This has been recorded adorned ,amplified and returned to view.
NKVD/Чекисты
NkVD,Чекисты ,Chekists ,the Soviet intelligence apparatus.
An Interpretation of The subjects who belonged to the system that stood behind the front-
The subjects are shown here are selected administrators organs and actors of the Stalinist state.
The subjects are shown here are selected administrators organs and actors of the Stalinist state.
ACQUISITIONS
Acquisitions are treated not as isolated purchases, but as placements within a long-term cultural and research-driven project.
A limited number of historically grounded, research-intensive commissions related to the Eastern Front are undertaken each year. These are developed through extended study and correspondence and are integrated into the larger body of work
PATRONAGE
COLLABORATORS
This project welcomes collaboration with historians, researchers, developers, technical artists, writers, and institutions.
For a shared vision, construction of a palpable moving historical world.
Serious inquiries are welcomed via the contact page or via email- youarestillinsideit1942@gmail.com
Biography
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
WORKS & INQUIRIES
— Studies in Encirclement The Internal Front — NKVD / OGPU The Continuous Present — Stalingrad, 1942–1943 Archival Contamination
Materials & Process
PRESS KIT
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
CONTACT
For acquisition, curatorial and press correspondence, commission or serious collaboration proposals, please use the form below. This project is ongoing and research-intensive. Messages are read carefully.
© YOU ARE STILL INSIDE IT ·
FINE ART / RESEARCH /ANOMALIES