About me
My name is Oleg Al, and I am a contemporary artist. I was born in Saratov, but have lived in St. Petersburg for several years.
I am an artist whose practice focuses on the exploration of systems—social, technological, and metaphysical. I am interested in how a set of rules (be it game mechanics, linguistic code, or religious dogma) shapes reality, behavior, and meaning.
My Orthodox Christian faith is a fundamental starting point in this research. It offers me keys to reading any system: the concepts of the Fall as a glitch in the program, redemption as a reboot, grace as an uncalculable variable. I seek traces of the transcendent in the logic of the algorithm, images of heaven and hell in the architecture of video games.
My creativity rests on a main fundamental foundation, and this foundation is the System of life, generated by God.
Thus, my art is a place of dialogue between faith and reason, order and chaos, predestination and freedom. It is an attempt to draw an invisible map of reality, where every line is a rule, and empty space is a place for a miracle.
My creative path
II've worked in various industries: as a designer in various fields, illustrator, and game concept artist. I have an incomplete higher education as an architect, and I also received a secondary specialized education as an artist-designer (industrial designer). I took specialized courses in digital graphics.
My creative activity began in childhood, at art school. I've practically always tried to engage in creative activity in one way or another, with a few exceptions. Art gave me a breath of fresh creative freedom and a free flight of thought.
How I work
I work at the intersection of painting, graphics, and sculpture, creating canvases and installations. In my work, I explore themes of physical processes and biological phenomena, as well as themes of contemporary advancement and the future. My art is based on four aspects: matter, spirituality, mentality, and emotion, packaged in an abstract-figurative narrative informed by spiritual and scientific reflection. The themes I explore in my research include cybernetics, bionics, mechanics, psychology, and social constructs, often combining these themes or drawing parallels.
For me, art is a way to communicate my vision, a way to convey the concepts and meanings that have illuminated or consumed me as a person living in this complex, yet fascinating, and often mysterious world.
