Keep away in a safe distance

Against this cultural backdrop, ten years after the inception of the Avatar era, the Petersburg artist Gregori Maiofis has created his photographic project [Mixed Reality]... this artwork ... constructing a beautiful legend for the future, with the rebel artist as hero. However, a retrospective look at the artist's path reveals his engagement of various subjects before [Mixed Reality] was brought to the forefont... The style of Gregori Maiofis - rightfully described as 'a brilliant storyteller' - formed gradually and is based on the contrast between profane subject and highbrow art... The artist's approach to painting and video-art was connected with deconstruction of the realistic school through denial of its forms. However, when Maiofis turned to photography twenty years ago, he accepted its hyper-realism as expressed the capacity to resist identification with a depicted object and become a apparently realistic self-sufficient entity...