VICTORIA KOVALENCHIKOVA                         

              "THE EARTH"

Exhibition: April 29- May 4, 2014

Reception: Wednesday April 29   7-9 PM

Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 1-6 PM

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ARTIFACT is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Victoria Kovalenchikova.  An opening reception for the artist will be held on Wednesday April 30, from 7 to 9 PM.

 

Victoria Kovalenchikova sets her limits high in the gestural work where color, texture and scale create a visual resistance to the play of infinite depth seen in the artist’s painterly passages.  This evokes a pictorial illusion of deep space, which is undercut by the artist's application of pigment and slashes of color. The result is a heightened drama that seems to have its own proud volition asserting the picture plane and the surface itself. 

Optical roller-coaster effects are held in careful balance through the artist's sheer. The limits of Kovalenchikova’s work are cadenced with exactitude and nuance allowing the spectator to enter the picture plane through multiple viewpoints. Artist’s work reminds us that the poetry in good abstract painting is in its infinite potential to revitalize its dialog with the viewer, to resist immediate comprehensibility through formal inventiveness.

The transcendence that plays itself out so readily in Kovalenchikova’s art is particularized through the ambiguities of scale.  It plays an important role in apprehending sensorially the given object and its gestural components in its given context of origin.  Kovalenchikova’s textures and spaces create a system of signification through its obstinate conflating of the near and the far, the close-up and the far away, the miniature within the large. 

As a result, it becomes hard to pin down definitively whether the eye is to place itself at a remove from the painterly action, so as if to give it more narrative play, or if we are immersed in action which occurs at a micrological, hence magnified, level. In the latter case, the piecemeal and personalized reading permits a greater sensation of mastery and of temporality. This compelling juxtapositions sensed as the work's clearly organized dynamism demonstrates the painter's exceedingly suave commitment to the essence of art.

Kovalenchikova, who is known for her large-scale representational work, explores abstractionism and allows a timelessness and presentness to intrude on notions of recording the life-world. Fleeting perceptions and sensations within the artist's sensorium are tracked and recorded through gesture and color, and through her uninhibited blotches and slashings. The immediate, the concrete and the irreducible of modern life is what Kovalenchikova’s has chosen to bring to light in his work. Her coloristically saturated paintings are the psychic spaces that resonate with our own value and emotion-laded perceptions of a world both atomized and united in a frenzy of space, speed and time.

 

For more information and visuals please contact the gallery.

UNFORSEEN WORLDS OF VICTORIA KOVALENCHIKOVA

By John Austin

Victoria Kovalenchikova sets her limits high in the gestural work where color, texture and scale create a visual resistance to the play of infinite depth seen in artist’s painterly passages. In her new body of work the artist creates a "dissociation of sensibility" with the ironic lack of relation between one feeling tone and another tone within painterly marks. This evokes a pictorial illusion of deep space, which is undercut by the artist's application of pigment and slashes of color. The result is a heightened drama that seems to have its own proud volition asserting the picture plane and its the surface itself.

Optical roller-coaster effects are held in careful balance through the artist's sheer. The limits of Kovalenchikova’s work are cadenced with exactitude and nuance allowing the spectator to enter the picture plane through multiple viewpoints. Artist’s work reminds us that the poetry in good abstract painting is in its infinite potential to revitalize its dialog with the viewer, to resist immediate comprehensibility through formal inventiveness.

The transcendence that plays itself out so readily in Kovalenchikova’s art is particularized through the ambiguities of scale. It plays an important role in apprehending sensorially the given object and its gestural components in its given context of origin. Kovalenchikova’s textures and spaces create a system of signification through its obstinate conflating of the near and the far, the close-up and the far away, the miniature within the large.

As a result, it becomes hard to pin down definitively whether the eye is to place itself at a remove from the painterly action, so as if to give it more narrative play, or if we are immersed in action which occurs at a micrological, hence magnified, level. In the latter case, the piecemeal and personalized reading permits a greater sensation of mastery and of temporality. This compelling juxtapositions sensed as the work's clearly organized frenzy demonstrates the painter's exceedingly suave commitment to the essence of art.

Kovalenchikova, who is known for her large-scale representational work, explores abstractionism and allows a timelessness and presentness to intrude on notions of recording the life-world. Fleeting perceptions and sensations within the artist's sensorium are tracked and recorded through gesture and color, and through her uninhibited blotches and slashings. The immediate, the concrete and the irreducible of modern life is what Kovalenchikova’s has chosen to bring to light in his work. Her coloristically saturated paintings are the psychic spaces that resonate with our own value and emotion-laded perceptions of a world both atomized and united in a frenzy of space, speed and time.

 

Fundamentally, it is the associative fluidity of the artist's works that compels us to take

stock of the fundamental ambiguity of the dream life, which harbors an inherent plasticity. It is not surprising to note that the de-formation of the imaginal is considered its most salient characteristic. The resultant luminous effects in the form of abstract forms seem to have filled and ultimately dominated the atmospheric territories surrounding them. This adherence to a spectral recognizability, just to the left of visual coherence, allows the imagination free reign as it is allowed to extend into a wide emotional scale.

This sense of play incorporates Kovalenchikova's hallmark capacity to evoke unforeseen worlds which provoke the eye. Aiding and abetting the artist's mischievous ability to question the autonomy of abstract forms as exemplifying an aspect of pure self-referentiality is her use of color, spatial displacement and shading. The result is the work triggering the imagination, which compels the mind and infuses the spirit within a radiantly world of dream and rapture.

 

John Austin is a Manhattan based art critic and writer.