Dmitry Ermolenkov has been a member of the WOSTRAU studio for about three years. He immediately found his own personal creative space, and we are pleased to present his first personal project.

Work on a series of portraits of scientists began about two years ago. Spontaneously choosing images of famous figures, he seems to renew them, endowing them with his own features (for in every portrait, as we know, there is also a self-portrait) - thus appropriating them and presenting them to us as portraits from which the “dust of time” has been erased. They cease to be reproductions from the school wall.

The degree of Dima’s involvement is so great that his hands and the whole body kinesthetically move synchronously with the emerging image, outline and act it out. While working, he likes to sing and recite poetry.

He begins his work on a fragment of the face that is important to him at the moment: Friedrich Nietzsche's Mustache, Albert Einstein's Nose, Sigmund Freud's Ear - they are the dominant ones at the moment. Then a new dominant appears.

The work process occurs simultaneously in different parts of the sheet surface, gradually connecting and forming a network. The face is like a complex map of routes made of folds, wrinkles, and hair.

The surface of the sheet as a system of correspondence between the movement of the plan and the movement of the hand. Every detail, every nuance is important, there is no main and secondary.

In his creative method, Dima himself is like a natural scientist who has not lost hope of exploring the finer layers of matter and finding even more elementary particles of existence.

Text: Alexey Ivanov, project curator.