Superevisory control point Phalloterapy, 2010-2011.

Evgeniya Maltseva paints men naked. Therefore she turns upside down the habitual gender pattern where a painter is in charge of his model. We deal with a drastic revaluation. She paints true males, harsh and full- blooded. The depiction of naked beauties has always been telling about the male manipulation of female sexuality. Here, on the paintings by Maltseva, we discover the sovereign female desire. Intension is the evidence of the painter's full presence in the art work. The worlds of Evgeniya Maltseva are saturated with colours and strokes. We feel the triumph of paint's movement on a canvas. Intension tells us about the emotional truth of the artistic expression. These paintings are catching.

“Her artworks excite and intimidate same time”. So (or roughly so) wrote Linda Nochlin of Jenny Saville in the beginning of her essay. And “she returns to the origin of painting”. She wrote so (or roughly so) in the end of the same essay about “Migrants”, the series of the paintings by Jenny. I don't have close at hand

a Gagosyan Gallery catalogue to check the quotation. But speaking about Evgeniya Maltseva I can easily repeat what Linda Nochlin wrote of Jenny Saville except a big “slight hitch”! Jenny Saville paints naked women sometimes making an exception for children and transvestites. Evgeniya Maltseva takes on disclosing men.

Observing other bodies pulls together the possibilities of one's own body. Merleau-Ponty has admitted it before. The work on male “nude” strips away before us painter's own identity. She performs a transgressive act, a heroic jump beyond patriarchy. Actually, Evgeniya Maltseva is among the few true feminists in up to date Russian painting. A man is represented to us as a passive performer. And a woman (secretly present) is shown as an active performer, a dominant character, an actor. Portraits of naked male butts are a harsh motion of female aggression. Those pieces of meat, which have shapes of butts, show us male body, cut and dismembered to its primary animal forms (in a similar way Chaim Soutine depicted carcasses at the butchery). A man loses his humanistic identity. He stops being a spirit bearer, a hero and a prophet, a leader and a scientist. He becomes a piece of meat, pure flesh. And we return to the magic primal origin of painting. A painter, like a shaman, completely possesses the item while painting it. This primary incantatory function of painting is usually covered by latter cultural layers, and to get free of them means to return to the world as it was before the history of art - to the world of matriarchy.