Natalia Pavlova

Why do we still need nature mortes? Is there room left among all the styles, the great names, the turmoil of the last century?
But a brush appears in my hand because I can’t stop in the search for color and light; because I want to capture an instant which may have been, or may not have been but should have, or which flew by without us noticing.
An instant of a melting summer morning, a ray of sun on a mug, a copper jug dropped into the space of history, bursting pomegranates, crumbling flowers...if you manage to stop for a second the cycle of color in a kaleidoscope of disappearances you can ask an object to play the role of a guide.
The subject is no longer important. There are too many of them now. Sometimes our scrappy memory sees not objects, but the color of the moment, the color of former reality, the color of the smell of coffee. So the boundaries of the object dissolve and connect to an immaterial substance. It can still be clothed in color, and this path carries us in search of the ultimate, the perfect. Fortunately, this does not happen, for no one knows the color of point zero. After a lull, an irresistible force builds up and the path begins all over again.

Private lessons, St Petersburg, Russia