Bretagne (2020) Painting by Maria Matokhniuk

There are two currents in the history of art which oppose each other on a very specific point. The romantic Sainte-Beuve is a supporter of biography to approach a work. According to him, it is necessary to know the life of an author, his morals, as so many sources for understanding his work. In contrast, Marcel Proust asserts that a work is independent of an author's life, and that the work must be appreciated for its own sake.

Faced with a Ukrainian artist like Maria Matokhniuk, we can wonder. What role does his country of origin play in the development of his work as a painter? Do his recent works, born after the start of the war in his country, bear traces of it? Is it necessary to know her history to understand her work?

What she presents to us are landscapes of beautiful serenity. Colorful landscapes, peaceful, seemingly banal. Landscapes of peace, of light. Which reveals a spirit in love with life.

These are paintings that do not reflect the atrocities suffered by his native country. Works which are not mirrors of a situation felt, experienced, but windows open onto the open sea, that of forgetting, of escape, of the offering of the infinite to our loving gazes. Whether it is deep, gray, orange, dappled skies, rising or setting suns, it is the freedom and serenity that Maria sings and enchants.

Maria is similar to the impressionists, so much she wants to translate into colors the impressions that natural beauty has on her sensitivity as a woman. This is all the more precious since today is conducive to the anxieties of the expressionists who project their vital misfortunes onto the canvas. God knows if our times are conducive to pain! This shows the price that this homage to the beauty of things reveals to our hearts.

There is in Maria's paintings a trilogy of creation which is: authenticity, love and poetry. What we find in every sincere creation, which starts from the heart to transform into a vital tribute. A form of simplicity without embellishments, of natural tenderness, which is the impulse of the spirit in the face of the treasures of nature, the most banal at first sight, the most precious opposed to death.

MICHEL LAGRANGE

• Nationality: UKRAINE
• Date of birth : 1978
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Ukrainian Contemporary Artists