Against the walls
Irina Volkonskii is creating art being aware of a society too manipulative of our minds. She wonders about who constructs and what, confronting construction and deconstruction concepts. When someone is deconstructing something is also constructing a new space because emptiness is also a thing even a no thing. What’s the rule of an artist or what’s art are some of the questions that Irina Volkonskii builds in her mind and express through her creativity astonished because society is today more intolerable with deep beauty than with violence. Irina Volkonskii’s art is a revolution against walls.
You describe your art as a dream catcher. Are your dreams a motor to recreate reality or a way to escape from it?
I believe that we are all artists from the birth, progressively groping our way in creation. But with the time the desire to create and express your world through the art can stop being at the first place but at the same time if it is not the prior thing in life any creative work will inevitably atrophy. The main thing for a creator is to create, this is the necessity which comes above all the rest, all values and loves, that is an obsession by the emerged idea, story which wants to be released, and if the creator will not enfold in this idea, will not grow in this story and will not let it free, it will either abandon the creator or start tormenting him.
One must not determine his own art, frame it in accordance with any fashion trends, put it in cage of common prejudice. I do not belong to the creator capable to correlate his own art with the determination of “recreating reality” or “a way to escape from it”. The creation itself is out of frames, free, going its own way out of any definition. For example, when a child is in the process of thinking over what he is going to draw and somebody will impose him an idea of painting a precise subject that will castrate his creative force, his imagination, he will be lost and will not create neither what was conceived nor what was imposed.
The mystery and the miracle of an art is that one cannot decide being an artist: each day, each event is guiding you to that, the conscious like a sponge is absorbing all the experience: positive, negative, shocking or fascinating. The inability to no longer restrain your expression naturally leads to creation. It is so overwhelming that there is no other choice.
Creation is an absolutely enchanting process when all your entourage, all you lived and thought through is converted in your subjective conscious and flowing out as a piece of art, which will be after exposed and estimated by the spectator through his own subjective conscious. The creation is like an alchemy, passing from one world to another.
Creation is an absolutely enchanting process when all your entourage, all you lived and thought through is converted in your subjective conscious and flowing out as a piece of art, which will be after exposed and estimated by the spectator through his own subjective conscious. The creation is like an alchemy, passing from one world to another.
Your art is full of colours. Are colours your way of deliverance?
Talking about my paintings I would like to specify that the prevailing colour in all my canvases is orange. It is connected with very important memories from my childhood which are still staying in front of me. It is the colour of fire, of the internal battle, which helps me to overcome the barriers staying in front of creation. In a number of my paintings we can feel the fatal presence of war and orange is presented there like a guiding light which gives hope. Sometimes I use orange like a dominant colour in harmony with other ones, sometimes like a suppressed colour to create an opposition, provoking the story which I am telling in this or that work. I am not sure If we could call it deliverance or not. I think it is more a nostalgia for childhood which is inherent in every person.
Your installation called Mines d’or (gold mines) is made with enormous crayons. Crayons versus guns?
Mines d’or is a very ambiguous installation, which conceals both negative and positive undertone, showing that almost nothing can be univocal. At the beginning the image appearing in front of our eyes is the combination of huge colorful pencils bringing us back to our childhood, like a harmless rainbow this installation is raising above our heads. Upon a closer view we can see that this multicolored idyll is not that innocent: the colours are very aggressive in there tincture as if they want to distract us from something, the pencils are resembling more the weapon of war, a pick, then a tool for creation. What is making me afraid is that in the nowdays’ reality some children have to fight but not to create. I have chosen the name Mines d’or (Golden mines) for this installation to remind the society about the way the gold is extracted. The mines are so narrow, that only little children are able to get into it causing a lot of childrens’ death. With this installation I am trying to raise the question: what price do we pay for the beauty and what beauty can hide behind it?
Je jette des ponts, hantée par la question de la construction. Where do your bridges go to?
“Je jette des ponts, hantee par la question de la construction”. With this expression I would like to say that I “throw over the bridges” to creations of other centuries, to stories of other individuals, to traditions of other countries, i.e. i am gathering the inspiration not only from my personal experience but also from everything where there is a story which wants to be told, sometimes to be told one more time just in another way and by another means. Very often even a simple word or a specific phrase can inspire me to let breathe the story which is craving to break free outside.
My experience with your paintings makes my childhood reborn. Do you think childhood dies naturally or is killed by social conventions?
I think that the childhood always presents with and in us, the childhood is where we were formed and what influences us in our adult life sometimes as complexes, sometimes in the form of phobias or as a perception of the situations we are going through. But at the same time while living we often hide our childhood, lock it and preserve till the end of life. It is interesting that at the deathbed each of us is returning one’s memories back to the childhood, to the place where sometimes it was good, sometimes - hard, the place from where we all came from.
Has death any rule in your art?
If death has any rule in my art? Regarding me and my creations I look at the death as a child, children do not understand the concept of death; they do not think about it and do not realize it. Nevertheless there must be a silent presence of death in some of my paintings as in any case we were all informed about its “friendly” visit. (можно использовать это в виде небольшой шутки).
What does an empty space suggest you?
An empty space is a very equivocal term. On the one hand empty space sometimes helps the peace of art to express itself in all its essence, helps to be better heard. For example my installation “Ceur blinde” presents empty space with just a hart, pressed between the barbed wire, tortured, lonely, hanging alone in the senseless space like a challenge, like a rebellion of feelings. From the other hand sometimes Im afraid of an empty space, avoiding it I try to fill it with plenty of colours, forms, figures, sometimes even with the unseen dialogues between the personages of my paintings, it is like I want to squeeze the unbearable silence and emptiness which can exist in an empty space. Voila, I can be a coward although I would love to believe in my unflinching courage! (тоже можно рассматривать как шутку, не знаю пока, как можно сказать про black hole).
The last thing I would like to say is that I think that all the artist are ambivalent as their creations. And all artists are poets as all the art is poetry!
Why do you think beauty is more intolerable than violence in society?
The term “beauty” for me is something which we are not able to give a certain definition to, something which is never clear, precise, with a lot of different angles. I consider that beauty can only be subjective and even in its subjectivity it has a lot of different ways of being perceived. When I face what I consider being beautiful I feel making a revelation, I am under the impression that all the cells of my body are breathing, willing to absorb this beauty or immerse myself into it. The beauty is so strong in its indefinability that at the moment of contemplation you almost feel it growing in your womb as it was touching each of your internal organs; at this exact moment beauty can be totally accepted but still sometimes not understood, like we can be not able to understand this or that reaction of our body.
I think that beauty is more intolerable than violence as the violence is normally evident and detectible: in almost all the cases violence is objectively perceived by the society, while beauty is able to split the society by its subjectivity. We can fight against something evident, but can we confront to something which we are not capable to define?
La beauté n’a pas froid aux yeux (beauty has no cold in its eyes). Is there no beauty in coldness?
The phrase “La beauté n’a pas froid aux yeux” in French literally means “The beauty has no fear”. For me it means that the beauty is strong, beyond the reality because it is something sophisticated to each of us, sometimes even invented. I suppose if something is beyond the reality while everybody believes that it is still a part of it, factually it can be a master. Is there no beauty in coldness? Beauty is everywhere; its apparition depends on the person who is observing it.
And do you think art must look for beauty?
All creations have already a beauty inside, in one hand it is the beauty of the will which has decided to give birth to something new;in the other hand the subjective perception of the spectator considering this piece of art being beautiful.
IRINA VOLKONSKII . A RETROSPECTIVE
Selection of works available here
An interview by Juan Carlos Romero