Fireline


Vladimir Logutov

kollectiv, Folkestone, 21st May-7th June 2026






 Vladimir Logutov often produces a double-take. Across painting, sculpture, video and curatorial projects, his work tests the eye, inviting it to settle on one thing only to reveal something else entirely.





“bright horizontal lines emerge from a monumental darkness”






Fireline at kollectiv Folkestone continues that provocation. At first glance the series of paintings describes streaks of fire at a distance. Across multiple works, bright horizontal lines emerge from a quiet, almost monumental darkness. Are we returning to the same site at different times, from different angles? Or should we think about these not as spaces at all but as blips and interruptions across colour fields? These are simple questions, yet the mind pulses. Looking at a Logutov painting, you are aware of both the work and the act of seeing. 



The question of multiple perspectives is echoed spatially within the gallery. On one side, the viewer encounters the fire at a distance, hovering like a line of light at the edge of visibility. On the other, the motif is approached again, as if the same scene from another angle — closer, and more intimate.



For the past three years Logutov has been painting a series of large monochrome canvases, devoted to fire but flickering with abstract gestures. Beginning in London in 2023, when the artist left his native Russia shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, the sequence’s earliest works suggested flames up close: by turns, the kind of mesmerising fire one might gather around and the hair-singing centre of an explosion. As the series continues, the paintings seem to gradually ‘zoom out’, and it would be tempting to read this distance biographically, psychologically; as time passes, so does intensity. Yet such certainty is incompatible with the paintings’ ambiguity. They offer no explicit narrative of retreat or resolution: what they provide instead is space — enough for such thoughts to arise, and remain provisional.
Indeed, for an artist so consistently concerned with the instability of perception, fire is a surprisingly loaded subject. It carries with it a prospective weight of associations — warmth and destruction, gathering and catastrophe, ritual and spectacle, ancient and everyday. In engaging it, Logutov seems almost to dare the viewer: can we still see the painting as a painting, or will the image pull us into its symbolic orbit? Abstract elements tether us to the work’s materiality — paint, gesture, surface — the horizontal line providing a minimalist, structural anchor, even as the presence of fire exerts its undeniable pull, as it does in life.




Here in Folkestone, where on clear nights the lights of France are visible across the Channel, the work’s associations come with the territory: the thin bands of illumination in Logutov’s paintings seem to wink across distance in a similar register; indecipherable signals at a remove. They speak of borders and distances, of reflection and separation, of the human figure made small in the presence of something immeasurably larger — the experience of standing at the shoreline, looking out.





“indecipherable signals at a remove”

Dislocation has always been present in Logutov’s work: the sense of perception shifting, viewpoints multiplying, horizons refusing to remain in place. What emerges is less a fixed image than a set of conditions for seeing — and as in life, what we see depends on where we stand.

Fireline is the first in Juha, a series of four exhibitions by Central European artists which continues at kollectiv through to February 2027. 



Curated by Sammi Gale

Design by Purdy