PAVEL KRASHENININ

I turn to imagery traditionally rooted in religious experience, yet remove its foundation in faith as a system. In this series, the sacred emerges not as an affirmed truth but as an inner state—unstable, contradictory, and open to doubt. The symbols here do not lead to revelation; instead, they register a moment in which a person confronts both the need to believe and the impossibility of accepting ready-made forms of belief.

The works are structured around the tension between an attraction to the sacred and a critical distance from it. Images dissolve, transform, and lose stability, while still carrying a force that resists full rationalization. This is not a denial of religious experience, but an attempt to consider it as a product of human consciousness—a space where fear, hope, and the desire for meaning intertwine into a single, yet unstable, structure.

“Sacred Without Faith” explores the persistent need for symbols alongside a deep mistrust of them. It reflects on how a person continues to generate forms of worship even in the absence of belief, and how these forms begin to take on a life of their own—becoming images of power, anxiety, and attraction.