“TRAMONTANE”. Catalog. Kyiv, 2008

English summary/Kateryna Kosjanenko/Museum of Russian Art in Kyiv/The Tramontane   Personal Exhibition   

Lidia Maschenko
Art-expert

Tramontane is the name of the crazy scorching Mediterranean wind that blows in the Spansih Catalon, Southern France and northern Italy. It is the wind of change, it can bring about an incredible creative spirit, or even a depression. In fact, the latest scientific research shows that depression stimulates creativity just as well…
The Tramontane was mentioned by Gabriel Garcia Marques and Joseph Brodsky in their works. Today it is Kateryna  Kojanenko, a painter of Kyiv who developed the subject. Her exhibition is not an attempt for a sensual image of elusive life.

The studies that have been painted this summery are true to nature. They slightly poeticize and theatralize the real environment of small colorful seaside villadge.You’d have a difficult time guessing where they are located in Croatia, Spain, Italy, or Greece. There is something similar, typical in them. The southern white hot sun lives in thous studies. They opalesce, shine with bright pebbles that look as thous they have fallen off a kaleidoscope of traveling impressions, colorfull embers of the sun, fleeting sea drops.

The paintings that have been made by the painter from the plein air sketchers have absorbed associative, sensual moments, but in fact, they are a transformation of what have been once seen, revisiting the impressions of the past. The works were painted in the environment of cold and humid autumn winds, sad winter Kyiv. So they carry some moderate and minor moods. It is an adapted summer, a feeling of nostalgia has some what sub dued the polyfony of the summer carelessness and the prime brightness of impression. The study motives have been zoomed in, reinerpreted and have become more generalized, deep, spacious, and monumental at the same time. The painter couln’t just help quoting the renaissance images and themes, they have penetrated her paintibgs, mixing with the image of the real persons that were close by.

The country you paint comes to live in your heart. First you arrive at an unknown place, where everything seems different, unfamiliar, but you star looking, listening. You come to understand many things, you get used, and when you come back home – your sudden realization is that you miss the away country, as thougt it was a person you had left far away.

Today, the art of Kateryna Kosianenko has been reformated by the new plein air discoveries and eye openers. It has been enriched with sunlight, humid air, and spase. The flat, almoest iconic convention and decorative aspect of the previous works, has turned into a classical convention with dimensions, ligth shadows, new tangible materiality and open srsuality.

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