1990 – TRUTH AND RUMORS

Between truth and rumor, purity and impurity, there is a state of being that is less than absolute. It is that place, of unknowing, of some kind of purgatory, Kourtev’s figures live in. Terrains of monotonous colour are in movement across the middle of the canvas, establishing the non-existence of a horizon, equally the non-existence of resolution. The figure’s bodies are each lacking in physical detail like faces, musculature, even the delineation of parts, as they appear half in colour and half on fire. The figures burn in a bright yellow, orange, and red liquidous mass that takes on the role of body, land, and sun. It is as if to say that the purgatorial state is either not simply a human experience, but also an environmental one, or alternatively, that the inability to experience purity by human beings makes the environment impure, too.