Eugenia Vronskaya

Review of Iconastas by John Byrne

Flaubert said “Be quiet and orderly in your life that you may be wild and revolutionary in your art” and in this early part of the 21st century where the artist has become a celebrity and the ’avant garde’ is, for the first time in history, the established order, it is more important than ever, it seems to me, that figurative art (which has nothing to do with the commercial dross that some associate with the term) is the ‘wild and revolutionary’ that Flaubert refers to – the stuff that smacks you in the kisser and gives you a hefty boot up the arse. It’s a popular notion that photography killed off the figurative painter (what it did do was put the kybosh on the salon painter – the camera was a much better liar), a notion seized upon much later by the smart but utterly cack-handed who galloped in and set up shop – they didn’t call themselves the ‘irony-mongers’ but that’s what they traded in: if it looked like crap it was ironic, geddit?
Anyhow, welcome to an irony-free zone – Eugenia Vronskaya, who understands genuine irony better than anyone I can think of, is that rara avis – a figurative painter in a time of cultural cholera who punches above her weight and on occasion (numerously in this current show) socks you in the eye when you don’t see it coming.
She couldn’t be anything but Russian and yet her Scottish/English is very often more eloquent and pointed that those of us who fancy we can turn a phrase in then hybrid lingo of ours. Her pictures need no interpreter – they can speak directly to the viewer, even the tone-deaf. Her canvasses sing from the walls and their song rings true.
And don’t be fooled when you meet her – she’s as tough as old boots. She has to be. In a world where the Celebrity Artist has a retinue of assistants who do the actual work while the boss flies off hither and thither to be fawned over Vronskaya rolls up her sleeves and gets stuck in.
Have a gander at what she’s been getting stuck into over the past months and get goose-pimples.

John Byrne, 2006

Eugenia Vronskaya CV

1966 Born in Moscow

Education
1975 – 79 Studied Icon painting and other religious disciplines
1981 - 83 Moscow School of Art
1983 – 89 Moscow Fine Art University (BA and MA). Fine Art
1991 - 93 Royal College of Art, London (MA), painting
Solo Exhibitions
1982 One woman show, ‘Kuznetskliy Most’, Moscow
1990 One woman show, Boundary Gallery, London
1991 One woman show, Boundary Gallery, London
1995 One woman show, ‘Socollnic’ Gasworks Gallery, London
1995 One woman show, ‘TMI’, Coppenhagen, Denmark.
2005 Boundary Gallery, London

Group Exhibitions
1983 – 89 Every year periodic group shows, ‘Kuznetskly Most’, ‘Krymskly Val’, ‘Magnet’ etc
1989 Group show, Mars Gallery, Moscow
1990 International Art Fair, Olympia, Kensington, London (Personal stand)
Glasgow Printmaking Gallery
Group show, Pine Plane, New York State, USA
1991 Group show, Discerning Eye, Mall Gallery, London
‘Art Express’, Mall Gallery, London
Group Show, Austin Desmond Gallery, London
‘XIXI’, Interim Group show, Royal College of Art, London
1992 Group show, Sireny Mission, Pachipanaway, Zimbabwe, Africa
1993 Degree show, Royal College of Art
1994 Kensington and Chelsea Centre Group Show
1995 Group Show, ‘DAD’, Gasworks Gallery, London
1996 ‘Stuck With It’, Group Show, Cubit Street Gallery

Awards
1990 International Artist Workshop Triangle, USA (Invited by Sir Anthony Caro)
Glasgow Printmaking Workshop
1991 Visa International Bursary
1992 International Artist Workship, Pachinpaway, Zimbabwe, Africa
‘TMI’ Award, Denmark

Public Collections
Pushkin Museum, Mars Gallery and New Trtyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Tate Gallery, London
V & A, London

Private Collections
Russia, China, India, Holland, Germany, USA, Africa, England, France, Denmark, Austria

Extract by John Russel Taylor, June 2005

One of the more intrepid Victorian women travellers once fell into a heavily spiked elephant trap. Clearly unintimidated by the experience, she sat down instead and wrote a text in praise of the virtues of a thick woollen skirt. It might not be the height of fashion, or even the most obviously appropriate thing to be wearing in tropical Africa, but if you were going to fall into an elephant trap it could hardly be bettered. Traditional Soviet art training seems to be rather the same. Certainly it is not fashionable anywhere today to be be taught how to draw, or how to copy a pre-existent style, or how to apply oil paint to canvas in the time-honoured fashion. Recipients of such an education might even think that, thrown into the maelstrom of contemporary international art, they would find little or no use for all they had so laboriously learnt. But, like a thick woollen skirt, it is great to be able to fall back on it in moments of danger.

Eugenia Vronskaya is living (very living) proof of the truth of all this. She was born in Moscow in 1956, and lived there until she first came to London at the age of 23. Someone, presumably, must have spotted in her a bent for art when she was still a child, for, enthusiastic as the Soviets were about vocational training from an early age, it must, even there, be fairly exceptional to be studying the techniques of icon paintings by the age of nine, and to move on to Krasnopresninskaya (the Moscow School of Art) at fifteen. Not only that, but at seventeen to go the Moscow Fine Art University, and emerge seven years later with a BA and MA in Fine Art.

That sounds like, and is, a lot of training. But of course in the 1970s Russia was only just beginning to throw off the trammels of Stalinism, and perestroika took even longer to filter down through the academies. Consequently, all Vronskaya's training was, by Western standards, very conservative and restrictive, heavily overshadowed by the tenets of Socialist Realism. Theirs not to ask why and for what: they simply learned how to draw anything put in front of them, and to do a very competent job of
painting it, whether the subject turned them on or not.

This was very much Vronskaya's mind-set when she arrived in London to study at the Royal College of Art, where, offered a choice between painting and printmaking, she very sensibly chose both and, even more sensibly, shared her decision with nobody, simply signing on to do an MA in painting and, once ensconced, to make as much use of the print-making facilities as she could contrive as well. All this meant that she was - I was going to say a fish out of water in the Royal College post-Hornsey, but a closer metaphor is a goldfish swimming confidently through a shoal of minnows. It was to the realist mainstream of Russian art, uncluttered by 'aberrations' like Constructivism, that Vronskaya belonged at the time of her first solo exhibition in London, at the Boundary Gallery in 1990. But it was no doubt inevitable that, once the Pandora's Box of modern eclecticism had been opened to her at art school in London, she could not resist breaking out of what must then have seemed to her a cage of realism, and dabbling, if only temporarily, in abstraction, the making of installations, and all sorts of other things not accounted for in Moscow's Groves of Academe.

At the same time she got married, had two children, and went with her husband when his job took him to Inverness. With so much going on, it is not surprising that she disappeared from the London art scene for a few years. But now she has decided to put in an appearance again - with electrifying results. And it is surely at this time that she (and we) can appreciate the advantages of possessing the art world's equivalent of a thick woollen skirt. Clearly she has learnt a lot from her adventures into less formal kinds of art: she has loosened up and come to look more like a British painter than a Russian.

But the disciplines of her original training are still in operation, a valuable support in times of indecision, a wholly stable base for venturing out into more dangerous territory. And curiously enough, that is the one thing she has not done - venturing out, that is - in the purely literal sense. She is still living in Inverness, amid some of the most spectacular scenery in the British Isles, and fully appreciates the beauty of her physical surroundings.

All the same, she says, "I am not attracted to paint landscape as such. When I look at it, I love it, and enjoy being there, yet it does not bring this other in me, when I feel I have to reach for the paints. But when I look at the configuration created by a jumble of the clutter of mugs and jars crowded on the kitchen sink, transformed by the light streaming through the window, it sets me off. It's the light, the form, the space, the mystery of it... The oddness and strangeness echoes something it me (whatever it is) and sets me to paint."

In other words, she is more of a Morandi than a Turner. And why not? Many artists have been content to see the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in a wild flower. And admittedly there can be something slightly - just slightly - inhuman about them: one finds oneself thinking, with W.S. Gilbert, "If he's content with a vegetable love Which would certainly not suit me, Then what a remarkably pure young man that pure young man must be." And purity of that kind tends to be more admirable than attractive. But if we pursue the comparison between Morandi and Vronskaya a little further, we come to an essential difference between them. Morandi was completely happy with his little collection of bottles and jars and canisters on a table; and there are pictures of great beauty where one feels that Vronskaya might feel the same, provided that the colours and textures of the bottles and jars are pitched in a higher and more varied register than Morandi would ever allow. But pictures by Vronskaya which isolate the crockery and glass are very much in the minority.

We have only to look at the drawings - and Vronskaya has few rivals in Britain for sheer draughtsmanship - to see exactly why. Some of the most touching of the drawings are of one of her children, and over and over again in the paintings come the evidences of their presence, in her home and her life. When the children are not visibly there, their games and toys are. Sometimes even jumbled up with the washing on the draining board, in a mixture at once realistic and surrealistic.

These are the paintings which most obviously assert their own magic, as they move in a tight-knit circle from painting to painting. Here the three little men, one of them a snowman, live in the shadow of the relatively giant grotesque mask which dominates another painting; there, in a third painting, the three of them are out on their own, in an abstracted blue universe with the hint of a starlit night - and suddenly, irrationally, one thinks of the Three Wise Men at the Nativity of Christ. Elsewhere, we seem on the threshold of Legoland - except that, transformed in Vronskaya's visionary imagination, the pieces become objects of wonder and romance, much as the children must see them.

And underlying it all, and in a sense validating it, is that superb Russian technique. Without the imagination, the technique would still not be nothing: at the very least it would be an object of admiration. But allied with the intense romantic imagination of Vronskaya, who sees everything through the eyes of wonder, it gives us the sort of rounded, integrated experience that only the very finest artworks can convey. Are Vronskaya's pictures classics in the making? I can think of little else in the current crop of art which comes anywhere near.