The project "SONG OF SONGS" is a fundamentally new stage in my life and my art. In order to reach it I did not painted pictures for almost 2 years, all my time was spent for spiritual and psychotherapeutic practices. I went from Moscow to my homeland, to the city of Izhevsk in order to return to myself, to hear my Sound, my Song of Songs.
"Song of Songs" is the canonical book of the Old Testament attributed to King Solomon. Including - this is a pre-wedding song, this is a transition to a new state from a girl to a bride, from the bride to the wife. Therefore, at the opening of the exhibition, I created a performance – I got officially married. It struck me that the Bible has a description of love between a man and a woman, a very passionate and glorifying body, not a degrading body. And this is good, because the body was given to us by God, so that we appreciate, respect, take care of it.
The questions I ask in this project are: What is love? Why do we need relationships, family today?... For someone it's a way of self-realization, self- affirmation, for someone catching a dopamine rush from falling in love, for someone escaping from loneliness. Some take it as an unconscious movement called "tradition"; for someone the family is an incubator for co-growing children. I believe that the topic of relations is a sore point in society, I see a lot of lies, hypocrisy, "masks" of well-being, anger, resentment, expectations, claims, accusations, disappointments, suffering and remoteness in relationships that were once magical.
Schopenhauer very accurately noted, "When people come into close communication among themselves, their behavior resembles porcupines, trying to keep warm on a cold winter night. They are cold, they cling to each other, but the harder they do it, the more they prick each other with their long needles. Forced to break up because of the pain of the pricks, they again come together because of the cold, and so - all night long. Why is this happening time after time, relations for relationships? People "consume" each other to meet their needs and desires, even when they are trying to do something nice. In this project, I try to find a way out, the "root of evil" and the solution of these problems, starting from the Old Testament book "The Song of Songs", believing that the answer is in God. What is love now, in the 21-st century? What is the relationship of the soul with God now, in the 21st century? I transfer the heroes of religious, mythological books into present.
Also I wanted to express the sound of the sandstone color of Jerusalem, which struck me when I saw this beautiful city for the first time in 2011 and I felt an inexplicable deep connection with Israel. Therefore, I partially left the natural color of the tree and the natural color of the canvas as a background in the paintings, so that this color would go through the entire project.
For the first time I am doing a project without any guidance and supervision, it's my Song of Songs, free from my own prejudices and the opinions of others. This exhibition is about accepting myself, so it has a lot of self-portraits. While working on them I meet myself.
The exhibition "Song of Songs" by Evgeniya Maltseva is the result of an exhausting search for creative and existential identity. The young artist is like Agasphere, the eternal Jew, wandering in search of the promised land, language and muse. An important milestone of the creative path was marked by the vernissage of the personal exhibition and the wedding of the artist in the space of four halls, on two floors of the Udmurt Republican Museum of Fine Arts. The role of the official representative of power and ceremonies master of the wedding was played by the museum director Vera Vakhrusheva.
The previous Moscow period of Evgeniya Maltseva's creative work was marked by bright projects. So, in 2012, the opening day of the exhibition "Spiritual Warfare" in the gallery of Marat Guelman caused an incredible rush from the conservative audience. The entrance to the "Vinzavod" exhibition center was blocked for the sake of protecting exhibits from a barbarous attack of Orthodox activists. Evgeniya Maltseva's appeal to sacred aesthetics was due to artistic technique rethinking. Evgeniya masterly works with oil and brush. Images appear instantly, like a movement of a tape in the hands of an Olympic athlete. A continuous neon line, passing along the edge of the contour, dives deep into the plane, creates a piercing volume and, condensed in the center, is substantivized into human flesh. Visitors of Evgeniya's light-filled workshop in the Narkomfin became witnesses for the birth of painting from graphics, a portrait from the impression. Evgeniya is an outstanding portrait master, but contemporary art is heartless towards painting. Since the time of the "black square" it is not enough to be just a good master.
For the sake of the exhibition at the winery Evgeniya went to Valaam, where she studied the basics of icon painting. The appeal to sacred iconography required meditative concentration. The result of the trip was the idea of an apophatic icon for the exhibition "Spiritual Warfare", and 3 years later a new technique was born - "scorching". Like Theophanes the Greek and his hesychast artistic practice, Evgeniya creates a volume of the wood surface scorched to the coal. Like the sun-scorched soil of the monastic desert became the central motif of the Troitsky side-chapel of the Savior-Transfiguration Monastery on the Ilyin Street in Novgorod, Evgeniya's boards became sacred matter, ideally suited to the chosen topic - rethinking of biblical iconography in the actual context. The Trinity appeared as an obvious reference to the Pussy Riot, Antichrist - the parsun of the head of the ROC Kirill. In this sense, apophatic theology as the practice of achieving truth through denial, has become the ideal formula for the scorched technique invention.
In the project "Song of Songs", Evgeniya parts from the current political theme in the direction of deeper reflections on the relationship between a man and a woman. It is worth mentioning that Zhenya abandoned the tyranny of curatorial thinking for the sake of creative freedom of expression.
The exhibition unites several art cycles. The main cycle is devoted to understanding the female image: Sulamith, the archetype of the beloved, the victim's image of a young, unsophisticated creature, a young one; Black Madonna, interpreted as an apophatic creature, more like Mary Magdalene before meeting Christ; The Queen of Sheba is a mature woman, powerful and magnificent. The artist's intension to give clues to the ambivalent female image hides much slyness. The selfie of looking down Evgeniya Maltseva is the key: C'mon, babe! Good try! The apotheosis of the female theme is lingam, assembled of cast-iron pots, forgotten forever pottery, used only in patriarchal village reality, where the center of the female universe was a huge stove: a source of warmth, convenience and hot food.
The logic of the exposition builds the transition from bride to wife through performance (wedding ceremony). It also adds symbolic images: images of death in a window framed by a carved clypeus, and assemblage of a deer horn in a gilded frame "The wedding night is painful." The author consciously changes the technique from two-dimensional plasticity to greater objectivity, fragments of philistine way of life, strengthening the sense of reality occurring in the process of marriage initiation. The white shroud of a wedding dress, skeletons and windows of old houses means a "memento mori" for a woman, dying for her parents and reborn in a new family, her husband's family.
The lyrics of "The Song of Songs" are perhaps one of the most perfect works in the history of mankind, reconciling a woman with her new role. Initiation is painful, and married life implies an infinite worship of a man, his ego requires sacrifice. Patriarchal society implies power in the hands of men, spiritual, psychological, absolute power. This social structure means the fusion of a man and a deity in the eyes of a woman. The madness of love is expressed by Evgeniya with the ultimate corporeality: the dancing body sprouts the testicle figs; red trembling knees in the painting "Prayer", combine both punishment and existential tragedy; male and female torsos are devoid of heads, but they dance ("For your caresses are better than wine").
You can recall the Kuprin's "Sulamith", which postulates patriarchal preferences and a male view. The humiliating journey of the Queen of Sheba on the transparent surface of the basin is an allegory of the inevitable trial of a wise mature woman who has fallen into the tents of marriage. Evgeniya Maltseva diagnoses male patriarchy and in this sense follows the feminist paths, associating her hard assessment of human weaknesses with the practice of expressionist painting of Francis Bacon, the greatest misanthrope of all time.
Male images are revealed in the expressive technique of Evgeniya's portrait. She refuses a man in a sacred interpretation. Man - Husband: «Joy» (portrait of Stas) appears in an idealized interpretation as Evgeniya wants to see him, smiling and calm. A man is a drunk guest at a wedding, a strange dancing relative, a holy fool. A man is Abuser, the worst thing that can happen to a woman.
In the exhibition project involved a cycle with the monkey mastering human subjects. The monkey rolls the ball on the floor, plays with children's toys. The movement of primitive animal consciousness is depicted on the same canvases. This reminds the graph of emotional outbursts, the color identification of the MRI picture, the stereotyped idea of abstract painting. Having paid tribute to the archetypes, Evgeniya reminds us that a man's distant ancestor was not Adam at all, but an ape that mastered the tool of labor, and that abstraction is an archaic pictorial form, like the instinct of self-preservation or reproduction.
The painter’s analytical journey of the artist to the origins of culture and creativity is blessed with a copy of Perov's portrait of F.M. Dostoevsky, recognizable, though executed in a brighter modern manner, as if Dostoevsky was pained by an abuser and a dark genius, Francis Bacon, similar to him. No matter how ambitious the reference to the key figure of the English expressionism looked like, an attempt to present the Izhevsk artist as a reincarnation of one of the greatest geniuses in contemporary painting, however, Evgenia definitely has the right to use the phrase "I was formed by Dostoevsky and Francis Bacon" as a commentary to this picture and a motto to the whole project.
The exhibition "Song of Songs" presents a new project of a young talented Izhevsk artist Evgeniya Maltseva, who has about fifty exhibitions in different cities of Russia and abroad, hundreds of works. A member of the Union of Russian Artists. The nominee of the Zurab Tsereteli and Petrov-Vodkin awards, as well as scholarships of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. Her works are in private and museum collections in Russia and abroad. One of the inspirers of the work of Evgenia is the famous English expressionist Francis Bacon. Neo-expressionism, the artistic movement she works in is practically absent as a phenomenon in the artistic life of our city and republic. Born in Europe in last century’s 1970-80-s, this style came into Russia only in the 21-st century. Despite the wide variety of exterior forms, neo-expressionism painting has some common features. For example, the rejection of traditional composition standards, an acute and ambivalent emotional mood, the absence of visual idealization, the use of bright and sharp combinations of colors. All these features are inherent in the work of the artist, some of which include the features of three types of fine arts: painting, graphics and sculpture, and performed in a unique way invented by the author. The image is created by burning a wooden board with a gas burner and subsequently painting with acrylic paints.
For the title of her project, Maltseva chooses the most controversial canonical book of the Old Testament, attributed to King Solomon. "The Song of Songs" (from Hebrew "the best song") is the love story of Solomon and the girl Sulamith, the only part of the Bible filled with romance and eroticism.
Exploring the theme of love and relationship between man and woman, the artist takes us from the Old Testament book to the twenty-first century. Performed on wood like icons, the images of Sulamith, the queen of the Sheba and the Black Madonna are self-portraits. Speaking against the generally accepted patriarchy, Maltseva extols the role of women. Therefore, it is not accidental that in the first dark "mystical" hall of the exhibition there are almost no images of men, except mythical guards. The peculiar "axis" of this hall is a phallic symbol, an object assembled from cast-iron bottoms placed on top of each other - the designation of the main components of the carnal life: food and sex. And if the first hall is, according to the artist, "mysticism through the centuries", and images created on the wood are a symbol of sacredness, then the second hall is a wedding, joy, light. Here appears a whole collection of images of men, created by colors on the mattress fabric, symbolizing the "bed". Among them: "Mandragora" - a male figure whose head is replaced by the leaves considered to be magical in antiquity plants; the "fig tree" is the embrace of two beloved, instead of the head of which the fruits of figs are the famous biblical shrub, the symbol of Israel. As well as quite specific male characters from the real life of the artist - "Joy" and "Dance of a drunken relative from Moscow at a wedding in Izhevsk." The second floor of the exposition introduces us to the new facet of the work of Evgeniya Maltseva, presenting works made on canvas (a figurative designation of our city with His military production), and telling about different layers of the human subconscious on the example of the works of "XXX" (Osho), "Abuser" (Freud), "Confession" (Dostoevsky) and others. The last examination room shows us four male portraits made on canvas. These are definite people with a complex, tragic and exciting, but interesting destiny.
"Song of Songs" is the artist's first independent project without any guidance and supervision. This is the "Song" by Evgeniya Maltseva, free from prejudice and the views of society, critics, family, religion, teachers, and friends. According to the author: "This exhibition is about accepting yourself, so it has a lot of self-portraits. Work on them I meet myself ... I affirm the woman as a spiritual being, free and manifested in love and in God."
