GALERIE IRAGUI

Galerie Iragui presents

Natalia Zourabova. Via Hebron

Over the green hills of the fruitful and blossoming land of Hebron, the spectators’ eye follows personalities of the artistic series called Via Hebron. His focus deemed by psychodelic stains designating the landscape. His attention finds nothing to concentrate on and continues to surf over. The viewer and landscape personalities share the same visual bio-mechanics. They both enter into a strange experience of feeling geography in a way which extracts its proper place.

The art of exemption makes the point. Natalia Zourabov’s painting is experienced as the multi-layer absence. There sparsity of reality and blankness of connotations is covered by the painted surface in a unique sense. Articulation of depth technique appeals to the viewer. It economizes his attention and gives him a simple sensation. His gaze surfs over nominal landscapes of colored, lilac, grey, and blue stains.

The attention captured by the Hebron myth resembles a corpus wrapped with the garments from different cultures. They grow in the way like tattoos made on child skin. Across Hebron - from King David and Absalom to Faulkner, and further to internet news reports and tourists blogs. The project distances itself from the air of these connotations. Wait up here – it is the point where Natalia Zourabov’s project starts.

Poster style, pop-culture visual line-up force into spontaneous perception. It indicates irrelevance of interpretations. Without doubts Zourabov’s paintings contain a certain code, a secret key. She needs it for conveying personal experience into project. It is necessary to appear in the world, like rail-tracks necessary for a train arrival. It’s life-experience code. The artist values existential roots of the project and she persists upon it. However, the viewer also interested in, would never comprehend it. It’s impossible and useless to break this intriguing code since it was created on the basis of personal experience. In fact it’s not secret but appears to be hermetically sealed.

What remains? Everything, in fact. The viewer reads his own traveling experience: same bus, same driver, day or night, a car in front of the bus, a military post on the hill. Anxiety accumulates gradually by picking and mounting of details from oriental and ornamental colorful mixture: patrol horns on the roof of patrol vehicles, block-post in the desert, dead dog on the road pavement, raptor* roaring in the sky, coast guard beam. Suddenly the viewer realizes to be transferred somewhere he did not expect to be. He feels abandoned in the enemy territory, and to be absorbed in the anxious derilium.

This odd, almost psychotic jump is a decoding key. Project reality is irrational even outside politics. It’s like an acid trip without acid. Irrationality comes from artificial phenomenon to resonate inside the viewer. It is like esthetic inquietude hardly comprehensible.

Thus, to continue along the way through Hebron with personalities of the series, one must grasp it and fill with subjectivity of his life experience.

Alexander Evangeli

* Interceptor

Opening on Wednesday, May 7 at 6 pm
May 7 - June 30, 2008

Gallery Hours: from 2.00 to 8.00 pm
Wednesday through Saturday
Sunday 1 - 5 pm
and by appointment + 7(903) 562 72 41

Gallery IRAGUI:
7/7-5, Malaya Polyanka,
119180, Moscow, Russia
Tel/Fax: + 7(495) 238 27 83