The apotheosis of the death of Listyev

I painted the picture in 1995, about two weeks before the death of the famous journalist and TV presenter Vladislav Listyev. Initially, I did not set myself the task of portraying Listev in the picture. I just saw this plot in my imagination: a man lies on a pedestal, grotesque glasses in the sky, a conditional urban landscape … After the contract murder of a journalist took place on March 1, 1995, looking at the picture, I realized that this image I saw in your imagination before the tragedy. In the portrait I wrote, you can even guess the features of the TV presenter. The name of the painting The Apotheosis of Listyevs death was born after fatal shots. All 25 years until recently, the work that had been removed from the stretcher and cracked very much lay in my storeroom in a large pile of drawings, sketches and the same secret paintings that I had not yet shown to anyone. Within a month, I completely restored it: pulled the canvas on a stretcher, restored the paint layer. In 1995, I still did not use patterns in my canvases, I discovered the style of ornamentalism in 1996. And then, in the 95th year, I was fond of surrealism and especially the paintings of Salvador Dali. Therefore, the original plot was without patterns. After the restoration of the painted surface, I decided to put a fine mesh of ornament on the image with a brush, to make a picture in my style of ornamentalism. The entire surface of the canvas is now as if woven from thin, hand-written patterns. The years of work on the painting are now 1995-2020. So in it there was an interweaving of my ornamentalism with surrealism and a synthesis of times and eras of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This work belongs to a few of my canvases, which I never showed to anyone, did not tell the story of their creation. Only on the 25th anniversary of the death of Vladislav Listyev I decided that I should show this painting to the audience …