MIKHAIL BATRAK

Mikhail Batrak is a Ukrainian artist whose work examines the relationship between perception, Surrealism, and empiricism. His creative process involves taking photographs with a digital camera and manipulating the results using computer software, combining disparate elements to create unexpected hybrid images. Drawing using techniques such as photomontage, digital drawing, and collage, he updates the tropes of Surrealism to the digital age, utilizing the visual language and style of the movement to pursue his own vision.

Mikhail used to be a merchant navy officer, a role that offered him an opportunity to travel and photograph landscapes using traditional techniques. However, he later realized that the beauty he was trying to capture was not intrinsic to the landscape but subject to his own perception, which was constructed both through social conditioning and the physical capability of his eyes and brain to form images.

It was this understanding that prompted him to start traveling inside his own mind in search of beauty, using the principles of meditation and contemplation to explore the particularities of his own perception. For Mikhail, the visual tropes of Surrealism offer an important channel for exploring personal perception and an empirical understanding of the world based on the senses, rather than following traditional and socially constructed formulations.

The senses play an important role in his visual world: disembodied ears, hands, and tongues point to how sensory perception drives our knowledge acquisition in a highly subjective (and limited) way.

His aesthetic language is inspired in part by his experiences in the navy. Images of water appear in many forms throughout his work: swelling like the sea, frozen as ice, and vapourised as a cloud. His images are often characterized by fragmentation, distortion, and deconstruction, which also echoes the artist’s creative process. He takes an active role in each production stage, only using photographs he has taken himself, which often incorporate macro objects or items he has sculpted. However, the main emphasis of his practice is not shooting images but the process of manipulating them digitally, exercising total control over the final image.

However, the main emphasis of his practice is not shooting images but the process of manipulating them digitally, exercising total control over the final image.

NAGUAL

Our religious beliefs evolve along with society to match contemporary ideas and knowledge about the universe and mankind. The beliefs of previous civilizations are generally considered obsolete, with materialism taking the place of religion in many people’s lives. However, some thinkers have argued that no period of materialism can last for long, as it will always be replaced by a new religious order. Our society is living in between; having rejected the old religions, no clear replacements are waiting on the horizon.

This liminal state of existence is explored through Mikhail Batrak’s series Nagual, a series of photographic manipulations that further the artist’s extensive exploration of freedom and unity. The artist took the photographic material that forms the basis of these digital collages in various locations throughout 2016 and 2017, including museums, studios, beaches, streets, and other public places. Mikhail began the digital post-production process at the end of 2016. The series is influenced by Mikhail’s study of Raja

Yoga and the work of Carlos Castaneda, who wrote about his search for freedom, partly through his experiences of being taught by the shaman Don Juan. Castaneda explores the concept of the nagual, a name for the unknown, or that which cannot be directly understood by the human mind. The nagual is positioned in contrast to the tonal, that which can be perceived by the human senses or comprehended by the mind. Don Juan described the tonal as a small island surrounded by the darkness of nagual. Mikhail’s series probes this darkness, using a limited black and white palette with muted color tints. Nagual explores ideas of transformation and the unknown through the artist’s surreal images, many of which refer to transformation, evolution, and states of metamorphosis.