Ten years passed. In Russia’s cultural and social life, we pass through the seasons returning to a cold winter. The news brings anxiety, sharp like ice. With this atmosphere as background, Nikita’s art appears even more alive and vibrant. During this decade it becomes clear how he engaged his subjects and explored themes parallel and diagonal to each other, but with one overriding message: life is love. Life is a light, a spiritual state and a great gift. His message is different from the flow
er child slogans of the 1960s. The artist maintains and confirms his message during a period of dramatic escape from his native country when he had the strength to leave his home and native landscapes (an important subject of his early work), leaving his friends and the protagonists of his early photographs. Nikita Pirogov finds a new home and new friendships in Cambodia; he engages his new surroundings, learning a new language with pleasure, along with different rituals, a new lifestyle. He pays careful attention to people and light, the light within people and that which illuminates the landscape. It is difficult to separate visible and metaphorical light in his photographs because his belief in the nature of light connects all levels of its manifestation into a single metaphysical expression of pure spirit.

Text quotation by Irina Chmyreva

All images ©Nikita Pirogov