Aliaksandr Biruk
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- 4 min read
Aliaksandr Biruk was born in Minsk and now lives in Warsaw. He trained in painting and later specialized in monumental and decorative art, where he learned to treat painting as an environment. He works with oil, acrylic and pigment on canvas and paper, and his paintings rarely land on anything concrete. He often describes his process in musical terms, asking how a painting should sound before deciding where it goes next. Right now he is painting a series he calls Forest, based on imagined walks through a place that exists only in his mind.
Q: You were born in Minsk and are now based in Warsaw. What did that move change for you as a painter?
A: Before moving to Warsaw, I lived in several other places, quite different from both Minsk and Warsaw. Minsk, however, in some ways resembles Warsaw—the architecture and the surrounding landscape feel similar, partly because they belong to the same post-Soviet region. Because of this, moving to Warsaw felt, in a sense, like a return home. At the same time, these changes of place made me experience "place" itself in a more poetic way.
The closeness of Belarus, and at the same time the impossibility of returning to the place where my childhood unfolded—where I had my first impressions—adds a certain mystical dimension to this feeling. Starting a life here pushed me to reconsider myself and my work, to look inward, and after the move my art became more personal, more rooted in the poetics of space and in the interaction between figures and a psychological landscape. Maybe it also became clearer.
Q: Your training was in monumental and decorative art. How does that background show up in your painting now?
A: At the academy, in monumental painting, we were taught to feel space—to understand volume and architecture, whether interior or exterior, to listen to its character and structure, and to integrate into it, to interact harmoniously while creating a new dimension and a new sense of presence. From this practice I developed a certain approach: I try to make a painting create space not so much inside itself as around itself, drawing the viewer in and forming a kind of "place" for them. A place for thought, for being, for reflection. If I put it differently, I carried with me the idea of creating a "place," where each painting is its own environment with its own atmosphere. Something like a small garden that the viewer can enter mentally, feel themselves within, and project themselves into.
Q: You've described painting as a kind of music, with rhythm, tension, and harmony. Is that something you feel while working, or more afterwards?
A: This description comes from the closeness between musical harmony and pictorial harmony—they function in very similar ways. In both cases, structures are formed that shape perception and create certain impressions. In a way, visual "music" appears inevitably in any image, no matter who creates it. I just try to approach it more consciously, sometimes drawing direct parallels and even using musical terms while working. I studied piano for eight years, and music was a constant presence in my childhood.
Now this process of translating between the visual and the sonic during painting really enriches my practice and often suggests where to move next. I simply ask myself: how would I like this to sound? And the answer usually comes quite quickly.
Q: Your work moves between abstraction and figuration. Do you start with something recognizable and move away from it, or the other way around?
A: There is a bit of confusion in these notions, because even the most realistic image is essentially a set of strokes and patches on a surface—which is already an abstraction. We only later recognize images from the real world within it. I think of the relationship between this visual base—abstraction—and recognizable forms in a way similar to the relationship between music and words in a song. Words are layered onto the musical structure, rhythmically and harmoniously, connecting the image that arises from the music with the image that comes from language and poetry. In that sense, figuration expands abstraction, adding another dimension to it. For me, the painting I make is a kind of expanded abstraction, enriched with a poetic component.
Q: You approach your work as a "play with ritual." What does that mean when you're painting?
A: For me, ritual is more the result than the process itself. What fascinates me is the human ability to transform something ordinary, profane, and everyday into something sacred, magical, or poetic through the imposition of a certain structure—a ritual. I am also fascinated by our ability to perceive this transformation: when the eye sees just a stone placed in a certain way, but at the same time experiences it as something filled with presence or meaning.
This capacity to add an extra dimension to reality—often through something that looks like a ritual—forms a kind of framework for my work. In a way, the artist does something similar with canvas, paint, and depicted objects: the manner of depiction itself gives them a different, expanded dimension.
Q: What are you working on right now? Anything in the pipeline we should know about?
A: Right now I'm working on a series that I simply call "forest" as a working title. For each painting, I go into this "forest"—a psychological, metaphysical, poetic space. I walk through it, observe, meditate, listen to its sounds, and make notes in a notebook while I'm there. This new series is a kind of collection of "places" shaped by these imagined walks. At the same time, the paintings together begin to form a larger, continuous forest—a space the viewer can also enter and move through mentally.
