Oleg Pospelov's art project

Many years ago, I was standing in the centre of a small island, free of counters, in a shopping centre packed with people on New Year’s Eve. I don’t remember why I suddenly stopped. There were people moving past me in all directions - behind me, to the left, to the right, to the front. They were everywhere, flowing around me like water. Human voices merged into one, like the sound of insects in a meadow, more of a hum than the clearly discernible chirping of a dragonfly or the buzzing of a bee, the merged voice of all of us.

And at some point I felt that the people walking past me, not talking to me, not looking at me, were me. And we are all one. The feeling lasted a second or two, but it was so realistic that I can still recreate it: closing my eyes and not seeing the boundary between me and all of us running around the shopping centre on New Year’s Eve. It’s me in the guise of other people running around the mall. I am one.

I can’t say that it was an unpleasant feeling, on the contrary, there was a sense of peace and quiet, I was part of something very big, strong. I didn’t have to worry about anything.
But for some reason I wanted to get out of this state and, as if avoiding falling into the void, I made a backward movement and, hitting someone’s basket, came back.
I was relieved that I was still me, that I had my own separate body, that I could move in any direction, that I had my own eyes and ears and separate thoughts. My own world. My own illusion of a world.

The works from the Singularity project emerged from scraps and leftover colours from another series, and are probably as random as life. Conception, nine months of maturation, birth - the new person survived the inexperience of young parents, school, adolescence, first love, stray money, didn’t get hit by a tram, didn’t fall from the fifth floor, didn’t die from a covid - it’s all a chain of accidents that we call «life».

The discovery of these works was also accidental. When I laid them out on the table, I felt what I had experienced in the shopping centre: something unified was emerging from these puzzles, a multitude of voices intertwined into one, each of them sounding on its own note, but together they produced a meaningful, powerful, full-bodied chord.

There was that feeling of something big, meaningful, indivisible again.
It seemed to me that it was like us humans. Each work is a separate character, a different personality, which, through a series of random events, experiences its singularity, singularity, singularity with different degrees of freedom, but in a separate body and in its own world. These small squares, only 10 centimetres on each side, cannot be seen from a distance, but must be approached closely, in a way that is not usually done with paintings. It’s like seeing and understanding a person - the usual boundaries must be broken, otherwise the picture will be inaccurate.

Each work in the series is its own story, character, event. One hundred and fifty lives - dark, light, joyful, sad, round and square. Each of them is a symbol of consciousness, which by some incredible chance suddenly dawned on us, here and now. Trying to stop and look around: isn’t what I see and feel a miracle?
I want to realise it on a physical level, to feel it, just like the absence of the singularity back then, in the shopping mall.