Critical texts, Italy, Bologna, 22 May 2015
If truth reigned over it, the world would look like Maryna Sakalouskaya's works of art. The Belarus painter elects the human figure as the highest representation of the reality and she concentrates the entire external world of humankind into it. The beauty of existence, captured through the artist’s working mastery, dominates every element of the depiction. The positive and the negative combine in a hypertrophic vision of reality where the presences coexist in perfect harmony. The wide use of symbols, along with hyper realistic images, enables the construction of a metaphysical style which admits the ravings of imagination as long as they have a realistic visual landing place. The fabulous lyricism clashes with the formal realism, thus creating contrasts that are accentuated by sudden figurative absences on the canvas, leading to a progressive deconstruction of the form often resulting in purely abstract compositions. Sakalouskaya’s abstraction may be defined, therefore, as a way to combine formal and informal, made more gentle by the chromatic idyll, both clean and bright. The dynamism of the structural elements (space, rhythm, color, line) makes up for the perspective flaws, giving rise to multiple storylines. Consequently, the formal wealth gets freely scattered throughout the canvas by using the third dimension depth. The beholder is encouraged to embark on a journey through the real and the unreal and get lost, although the journey is never arduous, but rather extremely pleasant. In the painter’s works, the concept of beauty takes on its most objective connotation, fostering a benevolent reflection on the meaning of life in the natural world. At long last beauty is both real and ideal. Upon establishing a dialogue with Sakalouskaya’s works, our approach to the world we live in changes. The return to a ‘simply’ beautiful depiction in present-day history of art shows how the aesthetic need of humans is nothing but a quest for the good through the beautiful and for a reconciliation with their own reality. The art work as a manifesto of the fickle and ever-changing human world gives way to the glorification of the joy of living. After all, didn’t Lev Tolstoj say that art means nothing but surrendering to life and that ‘good art is always understandable to everyone’? Real art, according to Tolstoj, triggers a positive ‘contagion’, meaning ‘that feeling of joy, completely different from any other, which one gets through the spiritual union with another being (the author) and other fellow listeners or observers who are admiring the same work’. Art ‘must suppress the violence’ and ‘make sure that the feelings of brotherhood and love of one’s fellow men, at present accessible only to the best men, become habitual and instinctive for everybody’. Like Sakalouskaya, we cannot but agree with him.
Denitza Nedkova
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