The inspiring Alices by Rumak Svetlana

Rumak Svetlana

"Ms. Rumak's enigmatic work is a rich synthesis of her unique visual vocabulary with medieval russian iconoclasm. The canvases are inhabited by humans and animals rendered in an earthy palette, set against very stylized but highly textured backgrounds. Like medieval Orthodox icons, her people have enlarged almond eyes with an otherworldly cast and long straight noses. The elongated figures seem weightless, and float in a spiritual atmosphere of spacelessness, without mass or shadow-casting volume. Also typical of icons, Rumak juxtaposes flat figures in ornately patterned garments with more fully modeled heads." 

Read and see more at the Rumak Svetlana's site


I just felt in love with the oneiric Alices by the russian artist Rumak Svetlana.
Thanks to Mark Burstein (my Alice hunter friend) who introduced me into her work.

First of all I felt very interesting to note the difference of texture and color from one Alice to another, from Looking Glass to Wonderland. Her Looking Glass has a pale grayish atmosphere, a winter palette, contrasting with the hot and vibrant Wonderland. There is a loving duel between smooth and scratched surfaces. The Looking Glass texture invokes a illuminated surface, where layers of nuances, blots and smudges veils blurs of invented times, inverted memories and dreams inside dreams. Her Chess player Alice dresses white, as a white pawn she became and the flexible and movable chess board invites our gaze to explore mysterious geometries and landscapes. In the first picture that follows here we face the looking glass and the chess board, both flat surfaces, liminar spaces that open portals to other realms and destabilize the common place world with new logics, paradoxes, languages and the belief in the impossible.

Her Wonderland has a more scratched than the smoky texture of the Looking Glass. The color is more  dense and intense, earthy and telluric.  Most characters are made of blue like Alice, in a game of to be or not that challenges her puzzling travel in a metamorphic body trough disturbing paths. Both Pigeon and the Caterpillar resembles her own face, while asking her who is she and what she is. A chessboard dances on the pages dialoguing with her Looking Glass nonsensical game. In this daring route of pictures in conversation, we became like Alice, invited to wander and wonder looking for arcane keys and the magical garden where Carroll's dream is dreamed again and again.

Trough the Looking Glass

     

                                            Rumak Svetlana

Rumak Svetlana

Rumak Svetlana

Rumak Svetlana

Alice in Wonderland

Rumak Svetlana

Rumak Svetlana

Rumak Svetlana

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