Maiofis Gregori

His pieces are metaphoric and allegorical, as in the Proverbs series. In this series, as in Aesop’s fables, elephants, monkeys, and bears inhabit our social world, where they play the piano, dance, and pose with a ballerina.

We may say that Maiofis embodies Aesop’s language of proverbs not only in the plot, but in the technique itself. The artist speaks in the language of photography, but he tells his story differently, in a roundabout way, using not only the figures of animals but painting effects themselves as allegory.

On the threshold of the New Age, where digital is replacing analog, the famous St. Petersburg lover of paradoxes turns to the past break in art - Victorian staged photography - in order to reflect the turbulent flow of time through the confusion of times and genres.

Responsing to the “boom of visuality”, Mayofis broadcasts digital nature with its own analogue media. The sheets, made in the traditional technique of manual photographic printing, are glued onto canvas-covered tablets; almost everywhere the edges of the images are deliberately carelessly cut off, which gives the impression of the work of an artist-designer. Such a presentation (besides the fact that it raises the cost of works on paper) is designed to sharpen the boundaries, assembly joints, which have previously created the main attraction in the art of Mayofis. Image commentary - not just a sign of conceptualism, but an important quality of the global network - now turns into a postscript below, taking up a separate piece of paper. Thanks to this, as well as the dragged base, the work is asserted in the property of the object.