Dmitry Shorin’s contribution to Orbis Imaginalis addresses image construction through idealisation, projection and technologically mediated bodies. The works shown in the exhibition place the human figure at the centre, yet the body does not operate as portrait in the classical sense: it functions as a carrier of visual fiction. The figures become sites onto which aspirations, models of mobility and contemporary myths of transcendence are projected. This mechanism has accompanied Shorin’s practice for many years and appears repeatedly in the recurring conjunction of women’s bodies with aviation imagery, engines and structures associated with movement and elevation.
The two works presented in the exhibition expand this system in different directions. One painting continues the iconography closely associated with Shorin: the body enters relation with technological extension and the figure moves toward a hybrid state between anatomy and constructed image. The second painting shifts the logic significantly: the woman appears from behind, facial identity disappears and individual psychology withdraws. Hair, shoulders and bodily orientation become the central organising elements. The work redirects attention from personhood toward image structure itself.
This shift is important within the context of Orbis Imaginalis. W. J. T. Mitchell argues that images operate as active agents whose meanings emerge through internal organisation and cultural circulation rather than passive representation. The rear figure embodies precisely this condition. Recognition remains incomplete. The viewer receives a body without face and identity without portrait, thus the image opens a field of projection.
Shorin’s aviation motifs deepen this reading. Flight occupies a dense art-historical and cultural genealogy extending from mythological ascent to twentieth-century technological utopias. Paul Virilio’s analysis of speed, vision and technological transformation becomes relevant here because mobility develops into a visual condition and reorganises perception itself. In Shorin’s works, engines and wings cease to function as external objects. They enter the body and participate in its redefinition. The human figure becomes technologically expanded.
This mechanism resonates directly with Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Borges constructs worlds sustained through internal consistency and conceptual order. Shorin’s pictorial systems operate similarly. Beauty, elevation, technological desire and idealised corporeality remain linked inside coherent visual worlds. The image sustains its own reality.
Hans Belting’s anthropology of images offers another point of entry because the body appears here simultaneously as image bearer and image producer. Shorin’s figures therefore occupy an unstable territory between subject and visual construct. Identity develops through representation and representation becomes a generator of reality.
Within Orbis Imaginalis, Shorin introduces a world built through aspiration. His contribution demonstrates that fictional systems emerge through projection as much as through deformation, reduction or material transformation. Reality appears as a carefully constructed image whose coherence remains fully internal.