Objects

Screens

"It is into just such a forest that the viewer is invited by Ekaterina Rozhkova's series of the same name. The artist herself proposes that we look upon these monumental screens as a symbolic barrier at the border between the inner and the outer worlds — 'the saving territory that surrounds the studio.'

The copper plate that serves as the basis for Ekaterina Rozhkova's graphic works carries an ambivalent symbolic meaning. On the one hand, the light-reflecting metal ground refers back to the gold of the old icons. Looking at these works, the viewer understands that before them lies a window into a metaphysical space, filled with an uncreated light, whose thickenings coalesce into images visible to the human eye — not the faces of saints, of course, but hares, foxes and crows. On the other hand, the intricate pattern into which the traces of etching left on the surface of the copper plate weave themselves does more than merely add decorative interest — it recalls the corrosion to which a naive fairy-tale world is subjected under the pressure of harsh reality. An imperfect, but idealised, illusion.

Although the "Forest" series also includes more traditional panels, mounted on the walls in the manner of the pictures a museum visitor is used to, its symbolic programme is embodied most fully in the screens. Their task is to divide space, to set the outer apart from the inner — to separate the fairy-tale, the naive, the childlike from the harsh everyday of grown-up life. The Russian viewer may perhaps remember how "the fairy, hiding behind the prim screen, hurried to dress," but in Ekaterina Rozhkova's symbolic system it is we ourselves who are hiding behind the heavy sheets of copper.

From the standpoint of formal analysis, Ekaterina's turn to such a traditional object of interior decoration as the screen can likewise be read in two ways. Like the productivist avant-gardists, this contemporary artist deconstructs the binary opposition between the applied and "high" arts. An object of the beaux arts acquires a function that complements the viewer's aesthetic reception of it, and extends its symbolic programme."

Extract from Evgeny Naumov's article "We Were Playing Hide-and-Seek with Reality Behind the Wall of a Forest of Memories"

Extract from Evgeny Naumov's article "We Were Playing Hide-and-Seek with Reality Behind the Wall of a Forest of Memories"

Link to the article: ST.ART

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