Anna Dvukhimennaya curator Moscow Museum of Modern Art

Ilana Raviv solo exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art

“Reflections”

By: Anna Dvukhimennaya curator Moscow Museum of Modern Art

It is conventional to call the second-half of the twentieth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century the period of postmodernism under which heading is understood a broad cultural movement. One of its chief characteristics is the condition of multiple styles. Postmodernist artists use figures of the most different stylistic orientations in their vocabulary of expressive means, by this creating their own ideas, different from any past periods in the history of expressive art.
Ilana Raviv should undoubtedly be considered an artist sensitive to this period, the era of postmodernism. Understanding the art of the avant garde as already the prevailing “classic,” she creates in her works a world separate from reality; however, she does not sever the connection to art of past eras. In the works of Ilana the viewer can observe the images of symbolism, expressionism, and even surrealism. The artist herself calls the direction of her creation “synthetic realism.”
The basic theme of Ilana’s works is femininity whose presence in the representatives of the female sex is in actuality difficult to describe in words. Ilana paints like a virtuoso of colors. This wordless, barely perceptible sensation of lightness in her creation involuntarily reminds the viewer of the images of symbolism at the end of the nineteenth century. In surveying her works, an image of weightlessness is sensed – something hardly perceptible. Thus in her paintings draperies appear, billowing in the wind that presses them against the window, with flowers standing on the windowsill; the same scattering wind Ilana paints also in the shock of hair on her characters’ heads – almost always women.
In still lifes Ilana depicts flowers in the same forms at first glance as the shocks of women’s hair. She paints trees and landscapes the same way, the drapery of fabrics, clothing – everything is imprinted with an image of lightness and instability. The unstable and expressive Ilana constructs also into the composition of her works, in her characters as if “more” space is cut out for them on the “canvas,” and figures appear either “distended” in these frames, clearly too small for them, or are shown only partially – only their hands or only their head, or only their eyes. With this composition Ilana symbolically emphasizes the impossibility of a precise depiction of reality, which cannot be described within any “frame.” She creates her “limitless world.” In this lies also the surrealism of her works.
The theme of femininity in Ilana’s works is obvious also in her compositions with doves, where women embrace them as though they are babies. Frequently the artist depicts a dove in a nest, although almost none of us has ever seen that in reality. Like this invisible, but existing reality Ilana speaks also about femininity, which obviously exists, but its presence does not so simply yield to description in words – it does not enter into the framework of words. This is “synthetic realism” – the image of a fact that obviously exists; however, it does not yield to simple description. For this it is necessary to resort to a metaphoric nature, to an “alternative version of reality” (as the artist says herself), in which this obviousness will be capable of becoming visual.

24-12-2008