Lubov Shakirova – curator – The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg

At a first fleeting glance, Ilana Raviv’s paintings appear as
clots of colorful chaos. We introduce an artist who creates
on the wave of emotional decompensation, without planning,
or formula, rather by intuition. Lines and forms branch out of control,
overmaster the artist’s will.

 

Ilana Raviv one person exhibition

The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg

“Only a woman knows…”

Lubov Shakirova – curator

At a first fleeting glance, Ilana Raviv’s paintings appear as
clots of colorful chaos. We introduce an artist who creates
on the wave of emotional decompensation, without planning,
or formula, rather by intuition. Lines and forms branch out of control,
overmaster the artist’s will. To surrender and give in,
gradually restrain their autocracy, adjust them, as if to gently
foster their random linkage, to spawn a composition devoid of
violence, without separating process from result, such
is the artistic modal instinct inherent in feminine wisdom and womanly
adventurism. Later we arrive at understanding that the
chaos of these canvases is live-bearing. Raviv’s paintings
are, in fact, figurative and her images are symbolic.

Leda, Cleopatra, and Lady Godiva differ in meaning and
time symbols of feminity, womanhood which the artist modernly
fills up with nervous, anxious dynamics and emotionality.
It is not a pantheon that we face but a rash, fancy-dress carnival.
Raviv not only interprets and portrays, but rather tries
them on her heroine – an ordinary occupation for a woman,
like rhythmical stirring of a boiling painterly brew.

A red ribbon in Carmen’s dark hair… Ruth’s timid gleanings…
Banished Hagar yearning for revenge, cuddling a baby…
Europa seated on the back of her enamored bull.
Fitted with mythological attributes and accessories,
Raviv’s heroine remains what she is, a woman of our
century and our world. Worried and sometimes scared, she is
often in a hurry and always late, barely placing herself within the
canvas frame, as if hustling to a train about to depart, or slipping
into shoes and a dress that are invariably too small. She suffers
from a lack of stability, order, and calm, but nevertheless, is
unable to stop. A frightened face, rough hair, and running legs she has.
No room left for her body; it is hushed up. No space is
left for a habitual erotic interpretation of the image.

A reference to an archetype, a prefigure is chosen by
means of stabilization, rooted in an infirm, floating and
glowing avalanche of chaos. Nevertheless, it is not
reliable, no stronger than a straw. An absent-minded viewer
might not notice this saving reference without first reading the
painting’s title . The artist does not insist upon it hastily, nor does she give
it away, on the run as it were, with an obvious insinuating accessory.

Rather, it appears to the viewer as a certain “déjà vu” moment,
a comforting remark in a conversation
between women, when something like this happened once before,
and has been lived through, experienced, and endured.  Amen.
The oeuvre of Ilana Raviv, an Israeli artist of the American
school of painting is introduced to the Russian viewer for the
first time. In the course of identification and rendering of her
oeuvre in Russian we can compare it with the dramatic and
expressive works of the “Amazons of the Avant-Garde:”
apocalyptic images by Natalia Goncharova, the Cards Cycle
by Olga Rozanova. Certainly, it is difficult to keep from men-
tioning here Jewish artist number one Marc Chagall. With
Raviv it is not a banal affirmation of her traditionalism. Raviv’s
painting is akin to Chagall’s lyricism, his mythological and
poetic imagery. The echo of his oeuvre rings sometimes audibly,
sometimes dimly in Ilana’s works.

The artist begins a secret dialogue with Chagall. She often
cites his Lovers: with a common face at halves they have
merged together like a Chinese Yin-Yang symbol. In Chagall’s
works the male component, certainly, dominates. His woman is
a fine, sublime object, adored, praised, hallowed, elevated by
the power of love. Man never asks for her consent to such
manipulations. A continuation of his body and soul, she has
been originally created for him. He dresses her up in the attires
of beauty and chastity, making her inner world impenetrable.

Ilana Raviv sides with the Yin. She gives a woman back her
power of speech, utterance, self-expression, and expression of
opinion on the world created for her by a man. The latter is
not even assigned a part of an object but of an accessory, an
attribute designating a regular incarnation of the “Great Mater,”

Nevertheless, time is lost. Incapable of implanting a salutary
matriarchy into this world, Raviv’s heroine ever and again
remains in a state of personal Guernica, forced to witness its
destruction. Frightened little Alice, she whirls on a merry-go-round
of chaos, clutching at the neck of a toy horse. She finds
consolation and refuge in ordinary, feminine, ancient
rituals: games of love, gloating over children, fostering pets, chatting
with girlfriends, trying on new dresses and masks