Celestial Chamber revisits one of the oldest stories of transformation: that of Enoch, a figure from Jewish apocryphal and mystical traditions who is taken into heaven and, in later accounts, transformed into the angel Metatron. Here, however, the familiar image of the angel has disappeared. Metatron emerges as something suspended between organism and machine, as though ancient mythology had collided with a speculative future.
The figure descends through a stone-like ceiling, most of his bionic body already visible, while his head remains on the other side, hidden from view. To the left, two large forms – flames, perhaps, or waiting figures – witness his arrival. The surrounding arches frame the scene as a threshold: a passage between the human and the post-human, the earthly and the divine. Architecture becomes part of the transformation itself.
Prokofiev pushes acrylic paint towards the dry, weathered surface of an ancient fresco. The colours appear faded, the silhouettes smoke-like and indistinct. Parts of the image seem to have been worn away by time, as though the painting were not depicting a lost civilisation but had somehow survived one.
The work suggests that today's ambitions are not as new as they appear. Our language has changed – from divine ascension to technological enhancement – but the desire remains remarkably familiar. Across centuries, humans have searched for ways to outlive the limits of the body, escape mortality, and become something greater than themselves.
Rather than placing mythology and technology at opposite ends of history, Celestial Chamber reveals them as different expressions of the same enduring impulse. The future, it suggests, may simply be another way of retelling our oldest stories.
Nikolai Prokofiev (b. 1992) is a Russian artist who lives and works in Moscow. He received classical academic training before turning to contemporary painting and drawing. His practice draws on mythology, apocryphal texts and ancient cosmologies, reimagining historical narratives through contemporary lens. Rather than treating the past as something distant, his work asks how ancient ways of thinking continue to shape our questions about identity, technology and what it means to be human.
Text by Maria Myasnikova