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Dirty Flowers
By Boris Bernstein
Maria was brought up as an artist in the spirit of broadly understood
realism and has more or less stayed faithful to its basics. She
applies dyes to the surface of paper or canvas in such a way as to
create some illusion of reality. In this sense she remains in thrall
to the classical antinomy of painting. A painting, while a
representation of something else, something which it itself is not, is
at the same time an autonomous "object for viewing," organized and
crafted by the artist, possessing its own value and interest. These
two fundamental properties contradict each other. A painting wants to
be a representation and does not want to be a representation; in
declaring its own presence in the world it defies the secondary,
sacrificial role of a replacement for extra-pictorial things. This
paradoxical unity is present independent of style or genre, whether in
an illusionistic Dutch "luncheon" or in an odalisque by Matisse. But
the nearly trompe-l'oeil old Dutch still life is significantly
different from the the 20th-century classic's nue in how they balance
the tension between representing (depicting, simulating) and being.
Here we approach the crux of the matter. Maria Kazanskaya has her own
strategies for maneuvering between the two poles. Reality remains an
essential and ever-present beginning for her -- a beginning and a
founding principle. Then, when it has been artistically experienced
and assimilated, Maria subjects it to an intricate painterly
sublimation. The very process of ascending to the tense duality of the
image is sometimes documented in series of paintings devoted to the
same subject.
