Olga Tobreluts’ work operates at the point where historical image traditions cease to function as stable references and begin to generate autonomous visual realities. The paintings included in the exhibition retain recognisable botanical structures, floral fragments and organic rhythms, yet these motifs no longer serve descriptive purposes. Petals dissolve into geometric planes, vegetal forms unfold into constructed chromatic systems and natural morphology enters a process of transformation in which representation gives way to pictorial self-organisation. The image becomes an active structure whose coherence emerges from its own internal relations.
This procedure is deeply embedded in Tobreluts’ broader artistic trajectory. Since the early 1990s she has been associated with the generation that introduced digital procedures, technological mediation and new image production into post-Soviet artistic discourse. Her practice repeatedly returned to historical material (classical sculpture, Renaissance references, mythology, botanical memory and art-historical archives) and subjected these systems to processes of reconstruction. The image therefore appears in her work as a site of migration: visual information moves between periods, media and cultural layers and acquires new meaning through reorganisation. Boris Groys’ reflections on post-Soviet image production and the transformation of artistic systems provide an important framework for understanding these processes. The role of digital construction and mediated image production further connects Tobreluts’ work to Lev Manovich’s analysis of new media and computational visuality.
The floral paintings presented in Orbis Imaginalis continue this principle through reduction and concentration. Flowers carry a dense art-historical genealogy extending from Dutch still life painting and scientific illustration to Symbolism, Art Nouveau and early abstraction. Tobreluts does quotes these traditions subtly, she extracts structural elements from them: curvature, rhythm, segmentation and colour transitions become operative units inside the image. The result is a pictorial space that remembers historical forms while simultaneously constructing new ones.
This mechanism resonates directly with Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Borges describes worlds whose reality emerges through internal coherence rather than external confirmation. Tobreluts’ paintings function according to a comparable principle, their logic remaining inside the image itself, meaning developing through chromatic relations and formal transformation. The viewer encounters a reality generated by the pictorial system rather than by mimetic reference. W. J. T. Mitchell’s conception of images as active agents rather than passive representations offers an additional theoretical point of entry here.
Colour plays a decisive role in this process. Deep greens, luminous whites, pale violets, saturated blues and sharply articulated transitions establish a visual architecture that oscillates between organic memory and abstraction. The paintings preserve traces of the natural world while exceeding descriptive representation. Botanical motifs become generators of another order. Reality emerges through transformation.
Within Orbis Imaginalis, Tobreluts therefore establishes one of the exhibition’s central propositions: images preserve visual memory while reorganise it. Historical archives remain active while their authority shifts. The image acquires autonomy and begins to produce its own conditions of truth. In this sense, Tobreluts’ contribution marks the point where inherited visual systems become fictional worlds: self-sustaining and continuously reformulated.