We do not live in an era of change. We live in the collapse of eras.
Foundations break. What once was solid crumbles. Paradigms that felt immovable fracture into dust.
The scaffolding of the old world groans, buckles, and falls. New structures hesitate in smoke.
This is not transition — it is rupture.
Fire run. Exhibition view. April 2025. Unit 3 Projects. London
A new series of monochrome canvases — large as gestures of warning, charged like signals. Inspired by the language of expressive abstraction, the series captures the moment when reality loses coherence, when history has not yet solidified into narrative, and perception flickers in a state of heightened fragility. Rendered entirely in black and white, the palette evokes the scorched tones of coal and ash, and the stark visual codes of documentary photography. It is the palette of truth — when colour becomes a luxury.
From the series “No path through the flames”, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 200 cm x 300 cm
Through monochrome austerity, material starkness, and a logic of trace, the work joins a lineage of art as witness — from Goya’s Disasters of War, to Kiefer’s monumental debris of memory, to the black-and-white scream of the twentieth-century documentary gaze. But here, the testimony is not illustrative — it is visceral. The surfaces bear the sensation of overexposure, a light so fierce it scorches away detail. What remains is not form but force. The eye searches for something solid to hold — and finds only vibration. This is not abstraction. This is memory before it congeals. Vladimir Logutov does not seek to illustrate current events, but to distil their psychological pressure: the ambient tension of a world unravelling in real time. It does not reflect what we see — it reflects what we try not to. The image becomes an imprint. A pressure mark. A trace.
Fire run. Exhibition view. April 2025. Unit 3 Projects. London
The exhibition space itself becomes a theatre of compression. The viewer is no longer a passive observer, but an implicated witness — held in the field of tension these works generate. The title of the central series, No Path Through the Flames, offers no metaphor, only condition. There is no safe crossing. No one remains untouched.
This is not a monument. This is a signal. A flashpoint. A visual document of an unresolved present. We appear to be living through a global reset — a shift into a reality that has not yet taken shape. Events erupt, remaking the coordinates of the real. The project does not portray this transformation — it breathes it. It is this transformation — fixed in material, charged with urgency, and alive with the heat of what cannot yet be named.
From the series “No path through the flames”, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 200 cm x 230 cm
About the artist
Vladimir Logutov was born in 1980 and is a London-based multimedia artist working primarily with painting and video.
He has exhibited internationally, including in The Unseen: The Fourth Guangzhou Triennial, Modernikon at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, as well as at the 54th Venice Biennale. At the 55th Venice Biennale, he was part of the project Lost in Translation, and his work was shown in The Way of Enthusiasts at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2020, he participated in the 2nd Garage Triennial of Contemporary Art in Moscow.
Logutov was awarded the Innovation Prize (Artist of the Year) in 2018 and the Joseph Brodsky Prize in Visual Arts the same year. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2019.
His works are held in museum collections including the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and FRAC Bretagne (Rennes, France), as well as in numerous private collections.
Instagram: @logutov_studio
