Nikolai Grigoriev

I make a life visible so that it can be lived as a work of art — and the life is my own. A body records itself without being asked. Day after day those traces, the depth of sleep, the evenness of breath, pass into the painting by one unchanging rule, and it changes as I change. Nothing is arranged by hand. The work and my life are made together: as long as I keep living, it keeps being painted.

My material is living itself. The work never shows me the present: a day becomes a painting only after it has closed, when there is no one left to perform for. What remains is the day itself, and being in it. When the life falls silent, the painting fades. When the days resume, it returns. Every day it has lived is kept. And this way of painting is built to be longer than one life: when my days end, another living body can take up the rule, and the canvas will go on being written from a stranger's days.

Nikolai Grigoriev (b. 1987, Moscow) is a conceptual artist living and working in Barcelona.