Walter Benjamin used the term Jetztzeit ('now-time') when referring to a moment without history, a moment outside of time: a sort of secularized version of the Scholastic nunc stans ('everlasting now.') The present is disengaged from history's causality, and from history's diktats: today's actions are no longer predetermined by earlier events. However, when allowing the historical continuum to collapse onto itself, signs and symbols are separated from their meaning, familiar iconography is gutted from its original content and the historically accumulated ideals of society are voided.

In the way that fashion evokes costumes of the past, the now searches the past for its roots, and models itself on past archetypal events and personalities. These works explore our vestigial cultural memory by conflating the iconography of contemporary entertainment with the archetypal images that are grafted in our consciousness. Thus, a visual and conceptual framework is created that serves as a compression chamber of cultural tendencies.

Models of being and of behavior from past and present are seamlessly joined. The world of mediated, simulated reality becomes that of the everlasting now, and the media moment becomes a moment of religious exaltation. Contemporaneity is represented as existing in a space divorced from history, where tradition is transformed into re-enactment, where historical images and personalities become prefigurations of contemporary media events, and where fixed meaning is challenged through the fusion of value systems.

Bee Flowers

One of the primary leitmotifs one can trace throughout the history of human civilization, is the acquisition of knowledge or meaning - and its subsequent slipping from memory. Cultures have searched, created and claimed truth, and have created characters and formulas in order to embody this truth's expression and/or to facilitate its transfer to their contemporaries and descendants. Often, successive civilizations have used the most important symbols of their predecessors as aids to express their own ontological concepts.

In his project "Jetztzeit," Bee Flowers explores the state of modern society which has inherited the symbols of many cultures and civilizations. He uncovers meaningful symbols in the contemporary destruction of the organized, internally consistent cultures of the past. The artist reveals a special space - one filled with events existing at a particular moment, but ripped out of their context of time and history and, accordingly, no longer fitting in their systems of internal and external semantic meaning. One of the most important philosophers of postmodernism - Walter Benjamin - has written on this perspective on events. In contrast to scholastic notion of "Nunc stans" (everlasting now,) he coined the term "Jetztzeit," which can be translated into Russian as "moment outside of time / history."

All elements in the works of this project are assembled by the artist from known sacred, mythological and historical images, which were created in their day for the symbolic transfer of knowledge of the 'Truth.' It amounts to our vestigial memory of cultural archetypes created in the past.

However, in these works they appear before us as "sterile formulas" - impersonal, devoid of any context or description of the figures, placed within a minimally indicated space, mere "fragments of memories," deeper than which we cannot go. Familiar iconography is transformed into formal rituals, but even to these characters themselves the meaning of their rites is lost forever.

In his paintings, Bee Flowers reflects the state of contemporary society's cultural memory - a memory from which the coordinates of value systems have been extirpated.

In the movements and gestures of the depicted people there is an aesthetic inertia, and an echo of a true pathos, but one from which that real, deeper meaning - which was to transmitted to contemporaries and descendants - has been completely and irrevocably lost. The movements of the characters in the paintings contain echoes of a bygone form of communication. Bee Flowers is drawn to the history of art as a repository of forgotten narratives, fragments of which now form the basis of the mysteries or rituals, played out by his characters.

The loss of the image's inner meaning allows the artist to forge changes, to perform castling moves within the compositions - he easily lets his characters exchange positions and combines characters from different historical compositional formulas in a single work , and exchanges roles of women and men, thus denying even the enlightened viewer the opportunity to read the meanings of the original images, and forcing him to assume new values.

However, the space of Jetztzeit as created by Bee Flowers is not just a string of empty shells, compiled at the whim of the artist. It is not of senseless mannequins and not of the distorting mirror of history that the author speaks. Any void requires filling, and the works of Jetztzeit draw in new meanings that are of our own time. But contemporary civilization can fill them only with the images transmitted by the mass media: those are the core values and the only the fundamental meanings which modern society has on offer, and which it tries to pass to its descendants. Therefore, in these paintings the attributes and symbols inherent in the iconography of the consumerist society emerge - advertising images, society ladies, sports motifs, etc. Even outwardly impersonal characters in the project are obviously akin to the ideal human being of mass culture: of unfading youth, sexually uninhibited and dispassionate.

The dissolution of the historical in the timeless, the "high" in the "low," the passionate in the indifferent, the personal in the global and the sacred in the (mass-) mediated - all of these levels of interpretation of the paintings by Bee Flowers are expressed and reinforced by the very technology of their execution. The very notion of "painting" remains valid insofar as the canvas is stretched on a frame. At the same time, the main thing - the image - is prepared in 3D-program files and are transferred from the computer memory (and thus, from historical memory) onto the canvas by way of digital printing.

Natalia Sergievskaya, art critic