In Search of Colour. Svetlana Smirnova. Exhibition. April 9 - 17, 2016

Svetlana Smirnova «In Search of Colour». Artworks and design

Central House of Artist. 10, Krymsky val, 3^rd floor. Halls 22,26,27

Svetlana Smirnova’s art is a bright and deep poem with neither the beginning nor end, filled with her utmost love of life. Plunging into her multicolored world you risk losing your head intoxicated by the powerful vibrations of the archetypical images, but when you come up to the surface you might acquire a completely different vision of the day-to-day routine. Her paintings research not the environment itself but attempt to penetrate behind the screen set up by the mundane view, to unveil the core of ordinary things which the talented artist senses with her heart.

The exhibition presents a vast range of Svetlana’s artworks covering both her early paintings created between 1980s-1990s and the most recent ones, among which each is imbued with the persistent, mighty and incredibly variable individuality of the author. Starting with her early landscapes, still lifes and fantasy compositions and ending with her airy sea views with soaring high kite-surfers, all her canvases demonstrate proficiency and insatiable strive to experience art space; the painter invariably follows her inner call – to fill the world with colour. She breaks away from the academic classic art and becomes enchanted by the French impressionism and later by expressionism. Her artworks start to acquire the second, third and sometimes even fourth layer of meaning due to the style fusion, daring experiment with colour and increasingly deep insight.

Svetlana Smirnova remains unchanged in one thing only — her admiration and respect for nature. The sea in her paintings emerges in most peculiar forms, frequently colored with unearthly shades; the trees look more as portraits of the inhabitants of the mirror-world than just wildlife objects, and Crimea with its fantastic hills and luring waters floats to the surface out of the artist’s subconscious depths as a paradise island misted with the author’s child dreams.

Svetlana Smirnova’s artworks and design cannot leave an open-minded viewer indifferent because looking at her canvases we seem to be following our own path of exploration, identifying with the author’s colourful emotions, feeling the same joy of discovery or the pain of alienation, and also the incessant desire to become one with the colour which can fill us with the mystery of being and for a moment make us closer to understanding it.

With the support of Quarta Gallery