Comment on Claude Monet
Monet is penetrating the soul: the first impression
Obscure and sensitive, mystery, colors, improvisation, absurd, chaos where elements seek and take their place momentarily, instincts, madness, composition and structure, unknown with the familiar, seine unseine, raw expression and yet delicately beautiful. To be like a trembling leaf in the wind and branches that reach out in different directions at different times of the year. Opposites within oneself come together, collide, performance as painting, each art work changes expression, each piece is its own process, a broader whole gradually emerges, non-sense, existence with the crazy grotesque surreal world demands reaching back into the rabbit hole, behind meanings. In performance, I have had a way or gesture to create some idea with oral or other narration and to stop and change the so-called direction, thus making a break with meanings that could lead to that interesting colorful endless wonderland between meanings and symbols. The painting event is a change and transformation in itself, a metamorphosis, a gesture followed by another gesture that breaks it, a trace a color, form, event, performance performer viewers, many variables that together form something between them but do not merge with each other. Colors and shapes carry with them, give strength, movement and movement in nature, in relation to nature, an organic movement that dominates and breaks the wholeness.
I have painted larger and smaller works, made spatial experiments, sketches, visual notes and assemblages. Impressions of Paris, water, light, river, water lilies, colors, black and white existence.
Many meanings can be attached to a water lily: perfect beauty, truth, purity, creativity.. a black water lily seems to change the atmosphere in another kind of mysterious and darker way.
Symbols are created when you start to give meanings to something. Also, owning something as a certain symbol and on the other hand, the struggle over meanings caused by counter-owning makes some symbol a strong signifier or cultural monument. Monument and water lily sound strange in the same sentence, but in the case of Monet’s Water Lilies or Nymphéas, one can also think of the monumentality of the water lily and also the greater spirit of the waterlily pond. In my works, the waterlily has emerged from the painting and formed an independent entity that continues speaking its own language, also somehow vulnerable without its growth element, water. The water elements in my paintings, mostly done with watercolor partly acrylic pens, and water lilies are detached from each other they are not harmoniously merged into each other but as if reaching out between each other, breaking away from certain meanings: the water lilies have found themselves on dry land.
I love those colorful works of Monet, like many others, and when I came here it felt right although also cliché, to interpret or comment on those paintings. I quickly started experimenting with not only painting but also assemblage or some kind of sketches and thoughts about objects, they started to be attached to the paintings. The dialogue of black and white brings to mind the mutually questioning and complementary powers of opposites. The world of colors is woven into this contrasting force field and vibrates in the midst of light, darkness and dim as part of the magic of the reflections of water and waterlilies.
IIDA NIKITIN 