“Solar Eclipse”, a group exhibition featuring three emerging Russian female artists, Olga Larionova, Olesya Svirskaya and Ira Tsantekidou.
These three artists each have their own distinguished styles in terms of the use of colour, composition and themes. Despite the difference in styles, the core elements of their artwork are man and beauty. The eminent diversity of the three young artists displays the versatility of contemporary Russian art scene and offers a sensational visual bouquet for the audiences.
In Olga’s vital paintings, the artist depicts the joy of life of humankind with music and dance. Her optimism towards life is fully conveyed in her use of vivid colour and dynamic gesture and movement of the people. She covers the elements of traditional folklores and mythical stories and put them into a contemporary context. The clown, which symbolizes duality of wisdom, wit, mock and ridicule since Shakespeare’s time is one of the favourite subjects of the artist. In her paintings, the clown plays an important role of bringing happiness to people. The artist, perhaps, is speaking of herself, for what she does is to bring joyfulness to the world. The design of the background, composition and the characters portrayed are derived from geometric forms, which can be traced back to De Stijl and Suprematism. The delicate details in her works are decorative yet of realism.
In contrary to Olga’s saturated hues, Olesya employs a colder tone. The diluted colour conveys a feeling of calm, stillness and vintage. Water and fish are motifs throughout her works. Water symbolizes life and fish, in Slovak folklore, indicates productivity. With the artist’s great technique, the water is transparent and buoyant, showing the light-heartedness of the characters in the paintings. The artist’s imagination is incomparable as shown in her depiction of human encountering mermaid, fishing on the moon and a man emerging inside a fish. The poetic narration of these imaginative stories is very pleasant and it attracts viewers to enter the artist’s creative world.
Ira’s portrayals of beautiful women with exaggerated and disproportional features are easily recognized by the big expressive eyes, flirtatious eyelashes and erotic thick lips. To Ira, painting women reflects their different moods and their deep inner world, so as the unique sensitivity that only belong to women. The images of Femme Fatale that she created are a representation of women of a particular era or context. The artist drew reference to Hebrew Bible for the symbolism of the animals that the women are holding, which represent their characters. The women are sometimes evil and sinful, while they are sometimes inspiring and faithful. The artist’s mastery of the contrast of light and shadow gives lifelike quality to her artworks, which also reveals her inheritance of Cubism and Pop Art.
Olga Larionova, Olesya Svirskaya and Ira Tsantekidou now live and work in Russia. Their works are exhibited and collected in Greece, France, Germany, Russia, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, England, Swiss, Holland, Italy, Spain, China and USA.
Image: © Olesya Svirskaya, Red Square Gallery
