Alexandre Sorokin

Noë / Red Cloud: An Apophatic Artistic Research Project

Noë / Red Cloud is a hybrid literary and visual artistic research project that brings together narrative writing, colour-based practice, silence, memory, voice, and inner metamorphosis. It develops from my long-term visual project Red Cloud, in which colour is not used as decoration, but as a structural way of approaching emotional and perceptual states that cannot be fully translated into conceptual language. The narrative project Noë extends this research into literary form. It follows a child moving through threshold spaces and inner worlds where memory, silence, voice, and presence take on spatial and atmospheric form. These worlds are not symbolic settings with fixed meanings. They emerge as ontological environments: inner states become worlds, and the narrative moves through them without reducing them to explanation.

The project is apophatic in method because it approaches what cannot be directly said through indirection, disappearance, recurrence, veiling, and incomplete revelation. The ocean, the house, the bell, the door, the flame, and the fading of memory function not as explanatory symbols, but as threshold forms through which the work approaches oblivion, transition, and the limits of representation.

For the apophatic.art project, I propose Noë / Red Cloud as a literary and visual contribution to artistic research on the unsayable. Text and image are conceived as parallel forms of inquiry: they do not illustrate one another, but belong to the same perceptual syntax of colour, atmosphere, silence, and metamorphosis.