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 the main 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
I've worked in various industries: as a designer, illustrator, and game concept artist. I have an incomplete university degree in architecture and also completed a secondary specialized education as an industrial designer. I also 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.
