Temples in Twilight. A Treatise on the Sublime Indifference of History

© Art Gallery 13. All rights reserved.

Andrey Gromov’s latest exhibition, A Tragedy in Stone and Silence, curated by Ieva Bendziute, is currently on view at Art Gallery 13, 5 Ducketts Wharf, South Street, Bishop's Stortford, United Kingdom, CM23 3AR, running from 11 September to 13 October 2021.

The exhibition engages with the spectral politics of architecture, where religious structures—mosques and synagogues—become both material artefacts and ephemeral echoes of historical violence. This body of work operates within a discourse of memory, erasure, and ideological intervention, interrogating how built environments serve as repositories of contested histories. The Soviet Union’s campaign against religion—ranging from the forced secularisation of sacred spaces to their destruction or industrial repurposing—becomes the central subject of Gromov’s visual archaeology. His paintings do not merely reconstruct these lost sites; they problematise the very processes of remembering and forgetting, illustrating how power inscribes itself upon physical space (Halbwachs, 1950; Nora, 1989). By treating architecture as both a witness and a casualty of ideological transformation, Gromov highlights the paradoxical relationship between permanence and loss, where that which was meant to endure is rendered fragile through historical intervention.

Gromov’s work can be situated within the ‘spectral turn’ in cultural theory, particularly in relation to Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology (Derrida, 1993). Derrida articulates how the past does not disappear but rather haunts the present, existing in a liminal state between presence and absence. This theoretical lens is particularly apt when considering how Gromov reanimates the architectural afterlives of Soviet-era religious erasure, using paint to stage the spectral persistence of memory. His works refuse to present a fixed historical narrative; instead, they embrace the instability of recollection, where the palimpsestic layers of history bleed into one another (Ricoeur, 2004). Additionally, Gromov’s practice aligns with Andreas Huyssen’s (2003) critique of urban memory and the politics of forgetting, wherein historical amnesia is often state-sanctioned, leading to what Svetlana Boym (2001) terms reflective nostalgia—a mode of engaging with the past that acknowledges its fragmentation rather than attempting to reconstruct a coherent whole. Gromov’s dislocated, fractured compositions embody this sensibility, visually enacting the tensions between memory and erasure, presence and negation.

His painting process functions as an act of excavation, unearthing spectral traces of religious structures that have been overwritten by political ideology. His technique is informed by a multi-layered approach, where the initial monochrome underpainting in oil mimics the aesthetics of archival photographs—faded, grainy remnants of a past that is neither fully accessible nor entirely lost. This method evokes Roland Barthes’ concept of the ‘punctum’(Barthes, 1980)—the affective detail that punctures the viewer, provoking an intimate and uncanny connection to the image. The monochrome base is then disrupted by expressive interventions in oil pencil, translucent glazes, and gestural brushstrokes, simulating the distortions of memory itself.

Gromov’s chromatic choices reinforce this conceptual instability. Bruised violets, acidic yellows, and arterial redspunctuate the surface, functioning not merely as aesthetic decisions but as semiotic markers of decay, violence, and the spectral residue of historical trauma. His architectural forms oscillate between legibility and dissolution, mirroring how historical memory is often obscured, rewritten, or contested. This visual strategy aligns with Aby Warburg’s (1929) notion of Nachleben (the afterlife of images), wherein cultural symbols persist across time, mutating within different ideological frameworks yet retaining traces of their former meanings.

One of the most striking paintings in the exhibition presents a mosque dominated by deep emerald and black, its architectural features barely holding together beneath thick impasto strokes of yellow and crimson. The structure appears both skeletal and alive, oscillating between construction and collapse. The inclusion of oil pencil scaffoldingsuggests an unfinished or interrupted transformation—perhaps a mosque in the process of becoming something else, a factory or an administrative building. Derrida’s concept of hauntology (1993) is relevant here: the mosque is neither fully present nor fully absent. Its ghost persists in architecture, refusing erasure. The violent intrusion of Soviet modernity is suggested through the gestural slashes of industrial colours—iron reds, oxidised yellows—imposed over the organic curvatures of Islamic design.

Another mosque appears more abstract, more broken, rendered in muddy reds and charcoals, where the minarets dissolve into the background. The use of distorted linear perspective echoes El Greco’s elongation of form—an intentional warping of reality to reflect its distortion under ideological pressure. One striking element is the lack of a human presence. This absence is Barthesian in nature—the punctum is the void itself, the missing congregation, the silence where prayer once was. If one were to extend Aby Warburg’s notion of the afterlife of images, Gromov’s mosque exists not as a depiction but as an imprint of Soviet violence—a memory trace in pigment and line.

The synagogue painting is visually distinct, rendered in deep purples, blackened stone, and eerie golds. The arches and windows appear fragmented yet radiant, their glow resisting total obscurity. Unlike the mosques, which feel attacked by external forces, the synagogue appears as though it is dissolving from within, as if history itself is erasing it, memory by memory. The purple and blue hues evoke a nocturnal, dreamlike quality, reminiscent of Paul Delvaux’s surreal cityscapes—places where time folds into itself. Gromov’s technique of layering oil pencils over a monochrome underpainting is particularly effective here, as the surface appears scratched, as if history is being actively erased. Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ruin as an allegory for unfinished history is pertinent: the synagogue is neither fully here nor fully gone—it is an excess of history, its spectral presence refusing complete dissolution.

Ultimately, A Tragedy in Stone and Silence is not an exhibition about ruins; it is an exhibition about the politics of ruination. Gromov does not depict loss as a static event, but as a continuum of disappearance and resurgence, where history is neither fully erased nor fully remembered. By engaging with the Soviet suppression of religious architecture, Gromov confronts a broader question: what does it mean to exist in the wake of forced forgetting? His paintings do not attempt to reconstruct history as it was, but rather to acknowledge the haunted presence of what remains absent. In doing so, he compels the viewer to engage with the silence of history—not as emptiness, but as a space of unresolved echoes.

References

Barthes, R. (1980). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang.

Boym, S. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books.

Derrida, J. (1993). Specters of Marx. Routledge.

Didi-Huberman, G. (2012). Survival of the Fireflies. University of Minnesota Press.

Halbwachs, M. (1950). La Mémoire Collective. Presses Universitaires de France.

Warburg, A. (1929). Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.

Tom Denman, residing in London, is a distinguished freelance art critic whose perceptive articles have featured in eminent publications such as Art Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtReview, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, e-flux, Flash Art, Ocula, and Studio International. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading, focusing his research on Caravaggio and the noble-intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Naples. Presently, his critiques primarily explore the subtleties and emerging trends within contemporary art.