About me
My name is Oleg Al, and I am an interdisciplinary 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 program glitch, redemption as a reboot, and grace as an uncalculable variable. I seek traces of the transcendent in algorithmic logic and images of heaven and hell in the architecture of video games. My work rests on three fundamental foundations: God, the System, and Feelings. 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 every empty space is a place for miracles.
My creative path
I work in various industries: as a designer in various fields, illustrator, and game concept artist. I have an incomplete university degree in architecture, and I also completed a secondary specialized education as an artist-designer (industrial designer). I also took specialized courses in digital graphics. My creative career began in childhood, at art school. I've almost always tried to engage in creative work in one way or another, with a few exceptions. Art gave me a breath of fresh creative freedom and a freer 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 advanced modernity and the future. My art is based on four aspects: matter, spirituality, mentality, and emotion, packaged in the form of an abstract-figurative narrative grounded in 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 share my vision with others, a way to convey concepts and meanings that have illuminated or consumed me as a person living in this complex, yet fascinating, and often mysterious world.
