Exhibition of December 2014

Painting by Sasha Bella steadily moving away from the story, plot. Increasingly depicted objects and places are sealed in a colorful mass, and more hints about their presence than in detail present themselves. Large, often ill-read inscriptions-comments underline convention and "pictureness" and, with few exceptions, do not inform the viewer something at all. Actually, more and more figurative qualities reduced to the horizon line, more precisely, to a simple division, the primary line of demarcation separating the bottom from the top, the earth from the sky. This is for artist, in terms of plot, enough. Nevertheless, it is a painting that does not tend to conditional formula where the depicting would become a mark, nor to full abstraction. For the painter is important an interaction with nature. It is important to make a visible way on its simplification, the effort of speaking of this. Artist quite satisfies with flicking on the border of figurative qualities, she does not intend to step over it.

Each time the artist begins to consistently reduce reality, it is reasonable to ask a question about her motivation. What remains to exhibit is just as important as what is expelled from it.

They seem as if personal things - food, flowers in a vase, fish - all this suitable fit for plot into the framework of post-Leningrad intellectually touching painting. Home, everyday life, like a warm, protected space on the background alienated Soviet-modernist-postmodernist-post-Soviet the universe. But plastic solution cannot conjugate the artist on this paradigm. Some black apple on black painting, which is difficult to discern, gray "M-I-L-K", barely visible hunched plants, shelf with something incomprehensible... Imaginary ineptitude of depicting gesture clearly hangs in the dark colorful vacuum. It's about anything, just not about comfort. Equally ambiguous is the case with the landscape.

Native Lenoblast’ fir-trees, distant fires, night rivers and sunsets - on the one hand, they recognized almost tactile, and with another - all the more cause to doubt in the availability of a definite natural prototype, or the intention to capture one. Also lyrics are absent. Ultimately, the story and the subject of this painting - the artist, with her physicality, motor skills, intentions and paint. No color, no flavor, no gamma - namely black, red, gray, white paint, as a substance, primal. Contact these two elements and become the main content of the work. It would seem - figurative beginning is unnecessary - but no! Here appears selectivity of the artist. Contact with the ground, with being is possible only in a certain situation, only somewhere. Namely - alone, in deepest retreat. Otherwise artist bumps in infested, sparkling and annoying modernity. Its confusing inconsistency, variability, multipartite, decentering is immersed in a passive split state. Since they are consistently cleaned out, distilled. The remaining after distillation - privacy as landscape, privacy as still life. Here in this purified space and played repeatedly drama pairing of artist and material. This act of self-declaration, self-creation, individualization. A generalized vision and allows to see itself as a whole, rather than a set of disconnected reactions on kaleidoscope of external calls. The artist as a whole appears during and at the time of the creation of the landscape. Thus, this exhibition - a series of reports about the places and moments while arist collected herself, was in fullness.

Alexander Dashevsky