Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
By DANIEL MAIDMAN February, 2019
I have been following Anastasiya Tarasenko’s art for some years now. She started as a talented painter combining classical tools and a confrontational, sexual sensibility.
Despite her progress and successes in this vein, she reported a sense of deep dissatisfaction with her entire mode of painting. She struggled to find a way to paint that expressed her vision more eloquently. She experimented with using arrangements of the figure to create pattern, as in the 2016 Untitled.
She also tried out cruder brushwork, applying her paint in a thick and broken impasto.
She worked elements of everything she tried into future work. The patterned figures appeared again and again, and the crudity of paint proved promising. But it was not yet crude enough for what she wanted. In Blue Self Portrait, the paint still serves to render fundamentally realistic objects, lighting effects, and spaces. As Tarasenko developed her idiom, she rigorously ejected her rendering impulses, until she was able to make an image with no reference to a real physical antecedent – a picture of an idea, evoked entirely through shape and color.
The Sum of our Parts, her first solo show, currently on display at Steven Zevitas Gallery.
In this insanely complicated painting, the figures are tiny and sculptural – built up to deep relief as daubs of paint on copper panel. They retain almost no internal expressiveness; they show the raw functionality of cartoons because they achieve their function only when they communicate their narrative content.
After so much struggle, Tarasenko discovered that she is an essentially literary painter. This painting is not looked at. It is read. It is a collection of specific anecdotes tackling a theme. Some of the material is visual, while some is literal text inside the painting. As in a book, reading order in the painting is imposed. The scale and detail makes the viewer lean in close and squint. The eye can only follow one of a finite number of smoothed paths through the composition – all other paths are counter-intuitive enough that one would not naturally follow them. One reads her new work as one reads an essay or a novel.
As an author, she continues to retain that confrontational, sexual sensibility. But now that she has finally innovated an information mesh dense enough to support her ideas, we find that her writing is humorous and wildly associative. Consider the bottom right of the composition. Two pink-and-white-uniformed schoolgirls play Hansel and Gretel, confronting the witch in her gingerbread house, here depicted naked. So she sets up the frightening encounter with the witch as the encounter of childhood’s innocence with the premonition of adult sexuality. Riffing on the theme, a volcano appears next door, into which another uniformed schoolgirl is being dropped, the virgin sacrifice to the volcano god. But the volcano is a beehive and its cells are growing eyes. The white eruption of the volcano is rather ejaculatory, and as the cloud of steam rises and condenses, it forms a field of breasts, which resemble the eyeballs in the cells below. In front of this field, a couple more bees fly a baroque banner which reads “The Earth is in my boner.”
This represents one reading-path through the painting, and demonstrates the hallucinatory quality of Tarasenko’s storytelling. It appears to come from that zone of allusive creativity where each object shimmers with multiple meanings, and each image crystallizes into the next through an intense but exotic logic. Such stories always address root questions of being, of matter and time, self and other, sexuality, in the key of those most elemental states, terror and ecstasy.
Her work takes its place with other visual art that is read – most obviously, ancient Egyptian painting, in which linear narrative sequences are illustrated by lines of “text,” one line above the next like a book, each line containing a flattened space populated by a semiotic field of characters and objects.
Next most obviously, she emulates Bosch, with his crazed, overpopulated worlds and compulsive, monstrous figures. But much as her sense of color, figure, and image density recalls Bosch, at a structural level she owes more to the Botticelli illustrations for The Divine Comedy.
The ancient Egyptian world is linear – one-dimensional. Bosch, for all his oddity, is essentially using three-dimensional aerial perspective, creating the infernal field as a hideous plane viewed from above. But Botticelli comes close, like Tarasenko, to a truly two-dimensional compositional sensibility. His figures and objects are like points in the Cartesian grid, their x and y coordinates conveying not only their location, but their meaning.
In this, Botticelli emulates his source: The Divine Comedy itself contains exactly the same grid-like structure. Ostensibly a linear, and therefore one-dimensional, story, it submerges its forward motion in a 10x10 grid, locating and repeating motifs at points of structural significance (the ends of cantos 34, 67, and 100, to take the example I best remember from school). The Divine Comedy is a floor plan for a two-dimensional space, and therefore moves partway from literature to picture – just as Botticelli moves partway from picture to literature.
After much struggle, Tarasenko has found her own way to this strange nexus of literary and visual forms. As it did for her forebears, this region provides her a rich ground for both sophisticated rationalism and wild fantasy. She recognizes that this is world-building, globe-spanning territory, and conforms her ambitions appropriately. Consider, finally, You Can’t Teach Old Dogs New Tricks.
You have to see this in person to get a sense of the dense lunacy of the stories. But if you stand back from it, or look at it on a computer, you get a sense of its Dantean sweep, from Here to There, ancient to modern, dayside to nightside, profane to holy, base material to precious metal. She’s packed it all in. She’s painting every idea she has as one ought always to paint, as if there were no tomorrow. WM
ANASTASIYA TARASENKO: The Sum of Our Parts
January 11 - February 29, 2020
Reception: Friday, February 7, 5:30 - 8 pm
450 Harrison Ave. #47 | Boston, MA | www.stevenzevitasgallery.com
Daniel Maidman is best known for his vivid depiction of the figure. Maidman’s drawings and paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Bozeman Art Museum, and the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art. His work is included in numerous private collections, including those of Brooke Shields, China Miéville, and Jerry Saltz. His art and writing on art have been featured in The Huffington Post, Poets/Artists, ARTnews, Forbes, W, and many others. He has been shown in solo shows in New York City and in group shows across the United States and Europe. In 2021 it will be included in the first digital archive of art stored on the surface of the Moon. His books, Daniel Maidman: Nudes and Theseus: Vincent Desiderio on Art, are available from Griffith Moon Publishing. He works in Brooklyn, New York.
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