Orbis Imaginalis: Fictions of the Visible

The exhibition situates the image as a system that generates its own conditions of visibility. Jorge Luis Borges develops this model most precisely in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” where a fictional encyclopaedia produces a coherent universe whose internal logic acquires ontological force. Objects exist through repetition, and linguistic structure; reference yields to a network of signs that sustains its own reality. This displacement provides a conceptual ground for the works assembled here. Each practice articulates pictorial fields where form operates through internal coherence, and where the image unfolds as an autonomous structure rather than a transparent vehicle of depiction.

Within this framework, figuration persists as a mutable configuration. Ivan Plusch’s paintings extend the image into a viscous continuum in which bodies and objects stretch, and recompose across the surface. The pictorial field behaves as a temporal substance, holding multiple states of form within a single visual register. Olga Tobreluts engages a different yet related operation: her work draws on classical image traditions and digital construction, allowing quotation to function as a generative mechanism. The image emerges as a site where historical references circulate and reassemble into new visual systems. In both cases, the pictorial surface sustains coherence while withholding a stable referential ground.

A comparable logic unfolds in the treatment of space and landscape. Irina Annina’s monochrome works construct environments that appear recognisable and at the same time remain suspended within a continuous surface. Spatial depth condenses into texture, and the landscape operates as a field of memory that resists localisation. Dmitry Shorin’s figures occupy carefully staged environments in which the body appears as a constructed presence, calibrated within a controlled pictorial order. Eva Shorina and Irina Drozd extend this condition through compositions in which fragmentation, layering, and chromatic intensity organise perception. Across these positions, the image produces a consistent visual language while maintaining an open relation to what it represents.

„Orbis Imaginalis“ thus proposes the image as an epistemic device. Meaning emerges through the interaction of forms, through repetition and transformation within the pictorial system itself. Borges’ model of a constructed world that attains reality through its own structure resonates here as a method of reading: the works operate within a field where perception is continuously reorganised. The viewer encounters images that invite recognition and sustain ambiguity, where coherence arises from internal relations and where reality is configured within the image as an ongoing process.