Detach emerged during Leonov’s final visits to Russia, continuing the experimental momentum of the Modus Operandi sketchbooks while shifting toward a more defined inquiry into memory and release. Initially intuitive and open-ended, the works gradually absorbed events, images, and emotional residue from that period, forming a fragmented, non-linear account of separation from place. Rather than documenting Russia directly, the series approaches place as something unstable: partially remembered, partially estranged, and increasingly inaccessible in material form.
Across the drawings, landscape, architecture, portraiture, handwritten text, diagrammatic line, and organic abstraction are each resolved through different formal means, yet held within a shared atmosphere of fading, suspension, and distance. The central concern becomes the necessity of releasing a material place while acknowledging the persistence of its essence in memory. Time and space converge, but once the moment has passed, only its immaterial residue remains; the site itself becomes alien. In this tension between the sensible and the intelligible, Detach renders fragmented memory not as loss alone, but as a condition through which image, distance, and self-awareness continue to form.