PORTAL PROJECT
Portal is a series of paintings created as gateways to the worlds encountered in altered states of consciousness. Each work is not an illustration, but a trace — a fragment brought back from those states where perception shifts, space changes its logic, and non-human presences appear.
These paintings function as portals: points where the boundaries between worlds loosen, allowing the viewer to sense the atmosphere, geometry, and entities of the realms I enter during visionary and trance-like experiences.
BEYOND
There is a phenomenon known as lucid dreaming — a dream where awareness suddenly awakens and you realize that you are asleep. This happens when you begin to sense that something in reality is not quite right.
You feel it at the edge of perception — as if something is trying to deceive you. There is a sense of a trap, a subtle wrongness. And in that instant, awareness arrives: everything around you is unreal, everything around you is a dream.
A dream is just an illusion, so there is nothing left to fear. You gain courage to influence reality itself, reshaping it at will.
I have experienced lucid dreams since childhood. And it carries a side effect: the waking world begins to feel unreal as well.Reality no longer feels solid or unbreakable. It becomes permeable and unstable.
Beyond is an attempt to hold this condition: the sensation that something in reality is not quite right.
To reach this state, I photograph at dusk, in fog, at night — during transitional moments when outlines blur and ambiguity opens space for imagination, allowing one to sense what cannot be seen with the eyes.
THE VEIL
Once, while listening to a piece of music, I was walking through an underground passage. Dim lamps overhead replaced one another in sequence. At a certain moment, I noticed that everything around me was moving in a single rhythm. The same rhythm was present in the music I was hearing. Since then, I have repeatedly observed this pattern.
Music makes it possible to see what is invisible to the ordinary gaze — revealing the underlying structure of reality. I call this layer the Veil. The Veil has a wave-based structure and is governed by a unified rhythm. Music tunes perception in such a way that this rhythm begins to reveal itself everywhere: in the flicker of a streetlight, in ripples on water, in one’s own footsteps.
The Veil is a thin layer of reality that conceals the subworld. It is felt as a fluctuating structure: densities shift, forms tremble, and space behaves not like solid matter, but like a medium. The Veil resembles the surface of water. It ripples, reflects, transmits, and distorts. Attention create ripples across it — and within these distortions, the depth beneath the surface begins to be sensed.
A sense emerges that familiar reality is only an upper layer, sustained by the movement of a deeper level.
The works in this section register the boundary itself — its fluctuations, transparency, and rhythm, revealing how the Veil exposes the presence of the subworld.
RITUAL
Ritual begins with movement. It is a dance with energy — alive, escalating, a state where caution is impossible. Where stopping is not an option. Where doubt has no place. Everything depends on you. On your ability to hold the impulse, to enter the flow, to let force lead you.
Ritual does not tolerate weakness or analysis. It demands presence, resolve, and the courage to surrender fully to motion. Improvisation becomes law. Works in this section emerge from that state: when control gives way to force, fear dissolves into motion, and crossing becomes inevitable.
Ritual is a dance of force — a dance that generates the transition from the familiar world of reality beyond the Veil. All paintings in the project are created in a state of active trance, at the moment of transition between realities — a proto-shamanic dance.
THE VOID
Void is a deep foundational layer of reality where forms have not yet stabilized and laws are not compulsory. There are no clear outlines, no familiar geometry, no noise of everyday structure. There is energy and primordial chaos — free, wild, unpredictable. And at the same time, there is silence.
In the Void, time loses its linear pressure. It does not rush forward or fracture into before and after. Everything exists at once — as potential, as vibration, as a charged field awaiting form. This space resembles a star-filled sky and the black depth of the ocean — the dark water from which everything once emerged and to which everything ultimately returns. Void is a cradle. A fundamental layer upon which higher-frequency worlds rest. It is infrasound. It is black, deep blue, violet spectrums.
Darkness here is not absence, but density — thick, fluid, almost aquatic. Forms are not yet defined, but they are already possible. Void does not reveal. It draws you in. Within it, the world ceases to be something observed and becomes something that must be entered. Void is a place I feel as my true home.
THE UNSEEN
While practicing altered states of consciousness and exploring anomalous zones, I encounter entities. Forms of presence with a different logic of perception and structure of mind. They are experienced as intelligent, yet their thinking does not align with human cognition — it is alien, unpredictable, and detached from familiar emotional frameworks. Encounters with them are possible in dreams or while awake when space enters the state of Beyond.
In such moments, contact remains partial — like a brief touch, a sensed gaze from the other side. The world opens slightly, but does not yet allow full proximity. A complete encounter occurs deeper. Through Ritual, through movement and impulse, a transition is made to the level of Void. There, contact becomes direct and intense.
The entities manifest not as images, but as active forces capable of interacting with perception, the body, and attention. This contact is not always safe. It can be experienced as unsettling or frightening. Their logic may appear cold, impersonal, even ruthless. This is not malice or benevolence — it is a different mode of existence. Each presence is sensitive to one’s internal state and requires its own way of engagement.
In the Unseen project, I study these entities through the process of art-making. The interaction takes place in an altered state of consciousness, in the form of creative improvisation. Music helps me enter a semi-trance. Painting in this state allows me to become a conduit for entities from the interworld. In the moment of contact, I capture the entity on the canvas — that is how a painting-portal is born.