Gorrillas | 2018 - 2022

The Gorillas series explores what makes us human. By placing gorillas in the roles, costumes, and settings traditionally reserved for people, the works create a subtle displacement that allows us to observe ourselves from a distance. These figures become stand-ins for human ambition, vanity, authority, vulnerability, and desire, exposing the rituals and hierarchies that shape our social world.

Drawing on the visual language of European portraiture—from Renaissance and Baroque painting to the grand traditions of aristocratic and royal representation—the series appropriates familiar symbols of status and power. Cardinals, nobles, knights, rulers, and courtiers reappear in simian form, transforming historical portrait conventions into reflections on the timeless nature of human behavior. Beneath the humour and theatricality lies a deeper examination of identity, social performance, and the fragile boundary separating civilization from instinct.

Beauty occupies a central role in this investigation. For Belous, beauty is both an intellectual and painterly pursuit, approached through the lens of art history and executed with meticulous technical precision. Yet beauty is never merely decorative. It becomes a vehicle through which questions of morality can be explored. The seductive surfaces of the paintings invite viewers into an encounter that gradually reveals more complex considerations about power, dignity, good and evil, and the consequences of human choices.

The gorilla functions as a paradoxical figure: simultaneously other and familiar, animal and human, outsider and mirror. Through this ambiguity, the works challenge assumptions about superiority, culture, and progress, inviting viewers to reconsider the qualities that truly define humanity.

While humour, irony, and historical references permeate the series, its central concern remains profoundly human: our endless desire to understand ourselves, our place in society, and the values we choose to uphold.