Lagoon

“Lagoon” by sculptor Semyon Zhokhov is a flying through the ages antiquity. Whether it’s a dance or a sweep of a wing, the swift stroke of a comet in the sky seems ephemeral, the composition is weightless, and the bronze forms are natural.

“Lagoon” seems to have descended from an Art Nouveau floral ornament, rushing so intoxicatingly into the embrace of the moon that its silhouette is involuntarily associated with the glass, the night flight, the phantasmagoria of the Silver Age.

The underlined grace is as figurative as it is abstract – like a feather in free fall, when it becomes movement itself. To capture it in detail means to stop, to break, to interrupt. The sculptor is extremely tactful about the understatement of his subject.

At the same time, “Lagoon” is a symbol of embrace. It is to the lagoons that ships have been returning for centuries. It is the lagoons that shelter coastal cities from storms. “The lagoon” is capable of embracing the elements – to save from destruction and loss of the one who trusts its fragile firmness.

The symbolism of the sculpture is in the intricacy of conventional forms. A feather, a moon, a fragment of a corset – the author himself believes that the symbolic cipher is priceless in the multiplicity of interpretations. And it certainly succeeds.