Viva la vulva! Uncharted space (2020) Painting by Elena Romanovskaya

       I am an artist of postirony. In my work, truth appears in disabiliation, completed with the trappings of sarcasm and restless eclecticism. I consciously turn to a naive interpretation of archaic images, which are becoming a refuge from aggressive environment. I intertwine them with explorations of the social and mental, creating my work in a loose space between simplicity and wit.

There is always a "gimmick" in my works; I incorporate the mechanics of defamiliarization into narratives and pictorial images, working with a horizon of nonsense. Absurdity, breakage, randomness generate something new that contradicts the already ready, cemented "system" of signs and analogies. The better the "system" works, the more obvious to me is the indispensability of gaps, intervals and inconsistencies as sources of new meanings.

I approach the modeling and transformation of the space between the viewer and the work of art in a meaningful way, setting the logic of the game, in which there are no losers or winners, but there is excitement. According to Johan Huizinga, the game situation that triggers the thought process is nothing less than an engine and catalyst for the development and renewal of culture. Each move I make in the game generates a tiny concept, a fragment or facet of an extended narrative: a travelogue, a tale, a fairy tale - everything that serves as the substratum of my work.

The genre tension, the inflamed color and density of the composition give away the continuity of the Expressionist tradition. Their visual images are imbued with ornamental motifs, a decorative lushness in which one ethnic genome or another manifests itself.

My art practice presents a synthesis of cultural contexts, the image of Joseph Campbell's nomadic, thousand-faced hero moving from one mythological system to another. Only one facet, one angle of view, is revealed in the painting. A large narrative is interrupted, and through this essentially ironic act a whole image is born. The works translate their preoccupation with narratives into an ornate but revelatory way of finding oneself in the other, following the poststructuralist logic of defining the Other, which constitutes the self. The selected fragments of cultural narratives are those that express personal beliefs, my sympathies and interests. Thus, the center and engine of my practice is the simple question, "Who am I?".

In the age of metamodernity we all find ourselves alone with this question, despite the illusions of permanent communication and encounter in hyperreality.

Postirony allows me to create a game situation in which the viewer can discover his own flaw, a log in the eye as an inherent sign of this being. In doing so, the rules of the game give no advantage to anyone: both, the artist and the spectator, are in fact in the dark.

• Nationality: RUSSIA
• Date of birth : 1989
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Russian Contemporary Artists