Solo Exhibition “Movement Colors”

Local History Museum, Baranovichi, Belarus, 2014

Painting as Alchemy of Color

One of the prevailing components of the artist’s gift is her emotional color gamma compelling to believe in the real entity of any artistic image.

“For me, painting is an expression of my intuitive sensation of color and of knowledge related to the concept of color studied in the Moscow country-cottage Senezh”, says Anna Zarnitsky. “In 1950-is in France, a trend of optical art appeared with its complex color combinations resulting in an unexpected effect which corresponds to my color sensations. The founder of the trend was Victor Vazareli (who worked in France from 1930 till 1997). Vazareli developed a system of optical principles for color distribution on the canvas. His searches inspired me when I studied in Moscow. Today I do many things of my own. I take two opposite colors and light them up. When two different colors come in touch within one tone, there happens a simultaneous merging resembling an aura created by light beams. In painting, it always happens on the cognitive-subconscious verge.”

The visual effect is that the observer feels by intuition the proposed motif assuming the appearance of presentiment, conjecture. Then it becomes apprehension, understanding, undergoing variations, interpretations, generalizations, and being incorporated in the dynamic figurative, in fluctuating and unusual images characteristic of modernism. This aesthetic conventional world is diverse. Here all the images, people, and animals are artistically equal. Here Torah is celebrated by dance on the sunset background, and expressiveness of the dance can send whirling the entire Universe. Here Sabbatical candles are piously lit. And here the velvety camels are pacing, bright bulls are abiding, bewitched peacocks are screaming, silvery queer fish are shining. Here Amazon is abiding with graceful Capricorn. Here the aristocrat prophetess foretells the fate. Here a young violinist girl and a golden-haired maiden with a mandolin in her hands, as if coming from the times of the Italian Quattrocento. Some of the images move from canvas to canvas. Sometimes these are accompanying attributes or favorite images, which come from close-up positions on previous canvases and become expressive components on the new ones, as, for instance, crimson pomegranates or bully dandy cocks always finding a reason for combat. But each time they appear anew, found out anew, though recognized for their color preferences.

The paintings of Anna Zarnitsky are thematically conditional, modern in their stylistics, where modernism of the first third of the 20th century is enriched with the up-to-date sensation of the objective world and the abstract conditionality. The world created by the artist is attracting, exciting, discovering the best of the human emotions, carried away by its festive color saturation, its capability of renovation and creation, its aesthetic aspiration for harmony.

Galina Podolsky, Ph.D., Art critic, writer