Aleksei Blagodarev

In the Around the Table series, I turn to a simple gesture — gathering at the table. It is a space between “I” and “you,” between morning coffee and evening wine, between words that were spoken and the silence where the essential remains. My paintings are not still lifes in the classical sense, but scenographies of human presence — even when that presence is invisible.

I’m interested in the table as a metaphor: the center of domesticity and ritual, a point of intersection for lives and cultures, a site of memory, love, solitude, and the endless repetition of the everyday. I work with objects — cups, teapots, fruit, bottles, tableware — and imbue them with a performative quality. They become characters bearing the imprint of time, mood, and emotion — things that can only be expressed through the quiet of objects.

My palette is deliberately clean and graphic: red and white, black and blue, green and lemon yellow. These are the colors of memory and sign. I simplify form but complicate composition — each work is like a storyboard, a still frame from a film, where the action has just occurred or is about to begin.

Around the Table is a chronicle of a lost and rediscovered ritual — togetherness. In an era of digital interaction and disconnection, I offer a return to the table as the last physical space of connection. Here, we can still slow down, touch things with our eyes, exist in the present. It is a form of resistance to forgetting.

In this series, I explore how the everyday becomes poetry, and how objects become witnesses. These are portraits without faces, where empty cups speak of presence more than any figure could. They are silent scenes from life, in which each viewer may recognize something of their own — the scent of childhood, the gesture of a loved one, the taste of a fleeting encounter.