Departure reflects on memory, time, and the instability of perception through the experience of revisiting a place transformed by time. Prompted by a visit to Leonov’s grandmother’s childhood home, the work examines the dissolution of spatial familiarity and the fragmentation of recollection, where direct experience becomes entangled with inherited memory. The painting centers on a hand derived from a portrait created two years earlier, extending through a fluid, indeterminate environment in which surface, reflection, and atmosphere begin to merge. Beneath it, a faint visage emerges and recedes simultaneously, suggesting memory as something continually forming and disappearing at once.
Rather than depicting a specific narrative, Departure focuses on the psychological distortion produced when reality confronts its remembered image. The work developed alongside Detach, sharing its concern with estrangement, temporal distance, and the unstable relationship between material place and emotional residue. Through subtle layering, submerged figuration, and restrained shifts in surface, Leonov constructs a space where perception itself becomes uncertain —where presence, absence, and recollection remain suspended in continuous transition.