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Painting, Oil on Canvas
Size: 36 W x 36 H x 0.5 D in
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Simple Things is the title of a still life and among the saucers, bowels, and papers is an Art Nouveau magazine. Art Nouveaux was a style known for its curving, rhythmic lines. The artist does not identify with it nor oppose it. As with Roginsky’s art, it is also full of movement. The device of the absence has a most particular effect here. The artist uses the empty space to show the disjointed movement of city life. Yet it also has the curious effect of ‘hollowing out’ that movement. The ‘modern’ city is busy, bustling, the very icon of ‘business,’ the central city or downtown typically the business centre. In the era of hollowed out production and the loss of industrial jobs, in the era of the unemployed and the underemployed, the era of those who flee the ‘real’ world into that of ‘cyber’ space, the city is something else, as is the very idea of place, location and the associations of belonging and affiliation. Also, the absent spaces have implications for depicting time. The spaces represent a gap, an absence. Memory fills in the empty spaces; through memory we are able to ‘make connections’ between different moments of time and thereby fashion out of otherwise bewildering sensation, identity. Out of memory’s resistance to time, life is lived. The artist’s own peregrinations, a life of convulsive movement, beginning with her Russian birth and education, her living in Jerusalem and now in Canada, her prints having been exhibited in Russia, Israel, Belgium, France, and Canada, suggests that the ‘place’ is not determined by the physicality of an actual ‘spot’ but more by the imaginative needs of the artist. That the actual place is a backdrop to the conversation the artist is having with her own possibilities for expression. In Roginsky’s case, oil becomes akin to water colour, the twist in the medium, the solid becoming fluid, the material, immaterial, corresponding to the conversion of actual reality into a metaphor for itself. Is Roginsky’s work a harbinger of an evolving world culture where place only matters as the space for expression — life becomes, in effect, an installation piece, a stage for the enacting of a drama that while dependent upon the actual place for some effects is essentially detached from it? In here interior scenes such as Old Dresser, Scattered Clothes, Kitchen I, there is slightly ore solidity just enough to prepare for a more dramatic reiteration of the same gesture with subtle results whose effects are magnified upon reflection. The viewer senses that the artist has more affection for her scattered clothes, for the figures and objects in that interior space. But that does not protect them against exposure. In Kitchen 1 the lack of apparent ground creates the impression of the table floating in midair; in Old Dresser there is a reflection of figure underneath here being nothing but ‘empty space,’ It is only apparently so because of the continual figurative pressure kept on the viewer by the devices of absence that convert the apparent empty space in one of reflection upon the object’s substantive quality. So, the reflected figure, itself a mere production of light, is the shadow of the viewer’s own mortality, What are we left with? Roginsky’s art persistently raises that question through its depictions of everyday scenes that produces the very opposite effects of their conventional usage. “Incomplete, sketchy style, and empty canvas for me is a way to express impetuous movement in infinitely changing space of contemporary city. Even in still life static is the most unacceptable thing for me,” she writes in a personal letter to me. Art is the impression that life leaves upon us in coming to its end. To be alive is to face ourselves with the impression, and movement is the act of facing. In that way, movement is not mere motion or contemplation mere stasis. -David Ross, 2013
Oil on Canvas
One-of-a-kind Artwork
36 W x 36 H x 0.5 D in
Not Framed
Not applicable
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I am using different media for my artwork - oil on canvas, watercolour, pastel and original print. During recent five years I mostly painting. Currently my favorite theme is cityscapes. I life-paint them on the streets of downtown Toronto and sometimes complete work in my studio. Hunting for an object in city jungle is an exciting and fascinating process for me. The goal is to get feeling of resonance with the environment, with the pulse of the city. I can’t and don’t want to work with photographs. I have to be inside. I have to see how rapidly everything in the city (people, cars, clouds and light) moves, changes, disappears. I reflect this quickness in my works by sketchy appearance, incompleteness of my canvases. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Elena Roginsky captures a moment in time through a process of observation and introspection. Her works are emotional and painterly, and rooted in the historical tradition of painting. They are created on location as has been done throughout the history of painting. Roginsky loads blank canvases and paints into her van and goes for a drive. When she feels inspired, she pulls over at the side of the road, places a blank canvas on the steering wheel, her easel, and begins to paint. Elements like the weather and the time of day lie heavily in her paintings. Spontaneity and nervousness seem to spill from the surface of each painting. The only time related obstacle to the completion of each canvas is when the police want her to move her vehicle or threaten Elena with a parking ticket. There is no returning to the studio with photographs to adjust or change the final painting. They flow in the moment in which they are painted, a thought in the process of becoming, a simple conscious effort to capture a moment in time. When I asked the artist about her preferred time of day and weather for painting Roginsky stated that “I like rain, snow because they make softness of contours and make air visible. I like summer as well but I don't like cloudless sky. It is as hard to explain why as explain why not every gentleman prefers blonds.” Her favourite locations for painting are busy city streets. Born in Russia, Elena grew up in Moscow and loves the big city feeling. She believes that her childhood experiences are the inspiration for her subject matter. She left Russia to escape during "perestroika" in 1991 and moved to Jerusalem, Israel.
Artist featured by Saatchi Art in a collection
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