Recent Paintings; Presence and Absence in the Work of Elena Roginsky

Recent Paintings; Presence and Absence in the Work of Elena Roginsky

In her new exhibition Recent Paintings at Praxis Gallery at 1614 Queen St. W., running from May 24 – May 30, Russian born painter Elena Roginsky challenges conventions of art, in particular that of time. Typically, art is thought of as a static moment. “By means of torn fragmentary composition, moving surfaces, offset plan and scale,” to quote from her statement, the artist tries to express a more dynamic notion of time; the techniques mentioned carrying the name “flow of consciousness.” Many of the works in this exhibition were made this past winter. Roginsky uses the whiteness of snow, traditionally, the winter, the symbol of death, as an ironic device to mount her challenge. Her winter urban landscapes have a curious washed out, incomplete look, at once strange, subtle, and thought provoking. It is as if existence, like the car tires in Avenue Road II, has been outlined against the nothingness of fading existence. The artist’s desire to represent time and the subtle effects has implications for the artist’s dialogue with the tradition of art itself.

Simple Things is the title of a still life and among the saucers, bowels, and papers is an Art Nouveau magazine. Art Nouveaux was a style known for its curving, rhythmic lines. The artist does not identify with it nor oppose it. As with Roginsky’s art, it is also full of movement. The device of the absence has a most particular effect here. The artist uses the empty space to show the disjointed movement of city life. Yet it also has the curious effect of ‘hollowing out’ that movement. The ‘modern’ city is busy, bustling, the very icon of ‘business,’ the central city or downtown typically the business centre. In the era of hollowed out production and the loss of industrial jobs, in the era of the unemployed and the underemployed, the era of those who flee the ‘real’ world into that of ‘cyber’ space, the city is something else, as is the very idea of place, location and the associations of belonging and affiliation.

Also, the absent spaces have implications for depicting time. The spaces represent a gap, an absence. Memory fills in the empty spaces; through memory we are able to ‘make connections’ between different moments of time and thereby fashion out of otherwise bewildering sensation, identity. Out of memory’s resistance to time, life is lived.

The artist’s own peregrinations, a life of convulsive movement, beginning with her Russian birth and education, her living in Jerusalem and now in Canada, her prints having been exhibited in Russia, Israel, Belgium, France, and Canada, suggests that the ‘place’ is not determined by the physicality of an actual ‘spot’ but more by the imaginative needs of the artist. That the actual place is a backdrop to the conversation the artist is having with her own possibilities for expression. In Roginsky’s case, oil becomes akin to water colour, the twist in the medium, the solid becoming fluid, the material, immaterial, corresponding to the conversion of actual reality into a metaphor for itself. Is Roginsky’s work a harbinger of an evolving world culture where place only matters as the space for expression — life becomes, in effect, an installation piece, a stage for the enacting of a drama that while dependent upon the actual place for some effects is essentially detached from it?

In here interior scenes such as Old Dresser, Scattered Clothes, Kitchen I, there is slightly ore solidity just enough to prepare for a more dramatic reiteration of the same gesture with subtle results whose effects are magnified upon reflection. The viewer senses that the artist has more affection for her scattered clothes, for the figures and objects in that interior space. But that does not protect them against exposure. In Kitchen 1 the lack of apparent ground creates the impression of the table floating in midair; in Old Dresser there is a reflection of figure underneath here being nothing but ’empty space,’ It is only apparently so because of the continual figurative pressure kept on the viewer by the devices of absence that convert the apparent empty space in one of reflection upon the object’s substantive quality. So, the reflected figure, itself a mere production of light, is the shadow of the viewer’s own mortality,

What are we left with? Roginsky’s art persistently raises that question through its depictions of everyday scenes that produces the very opposite effects of their conventional usage. “Incomplete, sketchy style, and empty canvas for me is a way to express impetuous movement in infinitely changing space of contemporary city. Even in still life static is the most unacceptable thing for me,” she writes in a personal letter to me.

Art is the impression that life leaves upon us in coming to its end. To be alive is to face ourselves with the impression, and movement is the act of facing. In that way, movement is not mere motion or contemplation mere stasis.

See: https://picasaweb.google.com/110609580810347181871/OilPaintings#