It is a well-known fact that all artists’ works are self-portraying. Swiftness of the eye, body movements, strength of touch are all reflected in painted shapes and drawn lines. Ms. Marina Fedorova uses the brush effortlessly and confidently. Her self-assured professionalism is tempered by a swinging, intermittent rhythm of movement and arrangement of shapes. The breaths in and out and the pause between them frame the inevitable cut-up of visual images, holding the lines, colour spots, and drawn words in the state of ambiguity, and therefore high potentiality, immanent to contemporary visual arts.
One Fine Day is the first solo exhibition of the Artist, bringing together three series of such pictures-moments-snapshots inspired by music and colour (Blues Story), film (Un homme et une femme), and fashion (Shoes Story). These stories are easily combined within the exhibition space, each episode being independent but at the same time sharing a common mood with the others. These weightless images – character faces, abandoned armchairs, and shoes as emotional copies of their owners – originate from a single source: an inner film invented by Ms. Marina Fedorova, in which characters, things, advertisements, stores, holiday resorts, and sitcoms find their momentous, at times harmonious but always aesthetic, forms.
ln the exhibition rooms of D137 Gallery, One Fine Day looks like a frieze or a strip of shots, fleeting moments lightly captured with paint. In the very discreteness of happiness, in the ability of joyous impressions to stem out of a human soul and proceed into the endless world, there is a scarcely noticeable melancholy accentuating Ms. Marina Fedorova’s blues stories. Looking at the elegant, sometimes sharp angles, one recalls both the immaculate designer freedom of the decidedly empty shots from the 1960’s and the currently revived feverish hedonism of the 1940’s, in a kind of reverse progression from Last Year at Marienbad to Casablanca, with Hearts of Four and Sun Valley Serenade also somewhere nearby.
Ms. Marina Fedorova’s exhibition tells us of her private infatuations and occupations, at the same time carefully, obliquely filling the screen space with the invoked shadows of the jazz and blues epoch which reaches out to us, entering our minds with fragments of its iconic close-ups.
Ekaterina Andreyeva
