Cherub extends Leonov’s practice into a more explicitly symbolic register, where a religious archetype is reworked through a contemporary lens. The centrally rendered face, constructed with controlled precision, emerges from a layered field of stains, markings, and radiating structures that resist fixed interpretation.
Rather than affirming its traditional role, the cherub is destabilized into an ambiguous figure of perception and influence. Repeated eye-like forms and orbiting linear systems suggest vision as both insight and burden, while the surrounding rings and traces function less as symbols than as residues of interaction—forces that shape, distort, and circulate around the subject. The image unfolds through accumulation, where clarity and diffusion remain in tension, and meaning is held in a state of suspension.