Her spontaneous manner of painting captivates the audience instantly with the “poetics of its transparency” in sensuous and careless images. In her art work from 2009 to 2013 the author overcame the artificial stiffness close to Secession styling that was too obvious in her series “Territory of Love” (2005, memories of exotic Cayman Islands). However, the loose coloristics and resourcefulness, developed in the paintings White Reef, Caribbean Kiss, and other compositions, have been used in a new way in the artworks of the recent years. Exotic sophistication and forced decorative character were replaced with sincere interest in not spectacular, but in extremely touching stories. That’s exactly what Lina Kostenko described in her poem:
Acacia in bloom –
White application on a cloud –
Explication of my childhood –
and simply acacia!
The brush of Olha Soloviova is capturing the beauty of the world that surrounds her every day. In a quick and improvised manner the artist creates “portraits” of the sun, water, trees in Kachanivka Park, magnificent meadows on the Dnipro banks, swift running of horses and a gondola, that fell asleep near an old Venetian palazzo.
Pumpkin Mecca of gardens
is all around.
Heat flows up into the
quiet skies,
While a stork dries its wings
Over an old chimney after
the rain.
Lina Kostenko
The task that Soloviova sets for herself is not to describe, to depict an image of nature (the way it was done by the Wanderers) but to convey the sense of the internal image of the growth of trees, grass, the landscape with its variability, with countless changes in state. This is not an easy task, given the strong Ukrainian and international traditions in both landscape painting and painting genres. Soloviova gladly avoids cultural and stylistic cliches through emotional and spiritual message in her dialogue with nature. The paintings made by the artist contain the energy of the world hidden from most people and this puts her work above classic mimesis (imitative representation of nature).
It would be rather appropriate to mention the romantic tradition, the origins of which are closely associated with the figure of Jean Jacques Rousseau with his philosophy of “natural man” and the similar “philosophy of a sincere heart” of Hryhorii Skovoroda. Soloviova’s trust to the voice of her own heart and sensibility makes her a true neoromantic of Rousseau type. The artist has mastered the art of turning the images she sees into a ‘sign of silence” and a metaphor of love. When Soloviova puts her landscape Land and Water (dedicated to Kachanivka) she repeats several times: “I was going on a date with an old love.” The similar position is supported by a very popular philosopher of our time Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, when he opposes the tendency of modern culture for overlooking and even rejecting any opportunity for building a relation to the world based on the presence in this world and not only on the “culture of values.”
In earnest, agitated perception of the environment, in love, which the artist does not hide behind a veil of intellectual games, a new world is pulsing, which Soloviova gives to the audience hoping for a dialogue with them. The artist invites others to see the beauty and get used to it, get into its essence. Unpretentious compositions in which we can see a window half covered with curtains or a corner of a building with extremely blue sky looking right behind it, or a balcony with Van Gogh sunflowers blooming – all the images reveal the core of Soloviova’s poetics. The artist’s neoromanticism has conscious or intuitive (this does not matter) resistance to the cold rational conceptualization of the world suggested by post modern art. Soloviova’s worldview praises the “aesthetics of presence.” In her paintings the voice of the artist is quiet but distinct. Its energetic message is so strong that the informational charge of a painting pulls the viewer from everyday life, from pragmatic concerns, and invites to plunge into impregnating silence, into the harmony, which is valued in Japan as “wabi-sabi” (plain beauty and restraint).
Is art of Olha Soloviova a way to escape from the ugliness of the everyday life, a shell where the artist can hide in this objectively dysfunctional situation for a society, which we all take for granted? Of course not! Soloviova’s paintings stand like beacons, like guardians and a pledge of order in the world that tends towards destruction. Lyrical neoromanticism, no matter how paradoxically, remains an argument in favor of preserving culture.
