Art critic- articles for exhibitions and catalog of 2004
Tatiana Yang's work lies in the traditions of fundamental cultures, the artist does not hide his appeal to universal values. This painting organically combines the asceticism of early Byzantine icons, its energetic disciplinarity in Russian religious symbolism and naturally flows into the redundant forms of the Venetian Renaissance school.By fragmenting, in reality Tatiana Yan expands the boundaries of the visual. The visible world of the surface of the work of art, its picturesque "landscape" merges in its images with the divine "fabric" of being.
FRAGMENTS OF TIME
Culture in the art of Tatiana Yang does not hide its own seams, spatial overlays and metamorphoses of time. It has that multi-layered collage that creates a new integrity and forms paradoxes, without which movement is impossible.Conceptual painting in Tatiana Yang's compositions is juxtaposed with magical realism and "new materiality". It includes the mystery of objectivity, the mystique of sensually tangible texture, the metaphysics of material, culminating in a physically tangible picture-thing-object.Traditions and traces of "remembering" lead here to the depths of centuries, turning the textured "noise of time" into the energy of the vital forces of modernity. The image of time appears weightily and visibly, condensing into an object, suggesting in its next phase to return to the atomicity of being, to the nature of "melting" and the energy flows of matter. Such destructiveness strangely shapes and protects the eternal materiality of the world – an imperishable other life, which is granted to culture and history.
Tatiana Yang's Spanish Series – This is a search for the primary sources of culture, its organic manifestations and at the same time the discovery of its new continents, where the spirit of Picasso and Cervantes, Velasquez and Lorca dominates.The artist simultaneously buries, preserves and even revives the dead nature of her travels and finds on the geographical atlas, returning the "lost time" of surrealist Spain and turning the nostalgic aura of its "blue and pink periods" into the relevance of the unity of human history and culture."Destruction" and "protection" in the phenomenon of Tatiana Yang creates a special optics where the past shines through the present, where the destinies of other cultures are organically projected onto the destinies of Russia, forcing us to think about the ideas of planetary and integrality of modern social and artistic processes.
MEDITATION IN THE BOOK OF GENESIS
Broken bread and plain water are images in which a person carries out a dialogue with the Creator, opens up completely different dimensions in Tatyana Yang's painting, creating certain oppositions to the simulations of modern art. The geometry of the icon, its structural principles, its "logos" and its "texts", its magical informativeness are considered by the artist through a fragment, through a part of the whole, revealing themselves in absolute completeness and perfection, approaching it extremely closely, almost physically touching. The scale of its optics allows the observer to turn into a participant, a witness of the event, enter the energy zone of the work and dissolve into it.The visual image of the work of art merges on the canvases of the artist with the uniqueness of the world created by God, its spiritual phenomenality. Water transformed into wine, in the magical amalgam of the artist's painting, continues to exist in its borderline situation – between heaven and earth, spirit and magical sensuality, table and Throne, rhyming with our states of prayer and fascination.
In Tatyana Yang's still lifes, as if half-erased and at the same time clearly, as in a looking glass, the majestic contours of a Book, an authentic Book with a capital letter in all its vitality and creativity, appear. Its signs and letters, its symbols and texts soar in the multilayered painting, are imprinted into the pores of its surface, where earthly paths converge to the horizon, and the distances of sparse expanses are exposed.Formally staying in postmodern strategies, Tatiana Yang turns into a time traveler, a pilgrim who preserves ethical principles in a continuous historical stretch. Her art, where the artist, the culturologist and the bearer of the sacrament are combined in one person, not only translates the fixed canonical traditions, but also reveals in them possible potential forms of life-giving renewal aimed at the future.
THE WAY TO CAPPADOCIA
"Going on a long journey, from the chronicles of St. Brendan
The last period in Tatiana Yang's plastic mythologies naturally turns into a visual apocrypha, where the entire image lives inside a fundamental context and is expressed in vivid colors. It is minimized like the music of Vladimir Martynov, but in his inner dramaturgy there is redundancy and completeness of experience. The meaningful side of the plastic action of the composition is hidden in the signs and symbols, in their relationships, in the transitions from the figurative to the ornamental. The fragmentation of the information field reveals Tatiana Yang's special plastic "optics", her concentration and openness to communication with the upper world. The space of artistic vision in these coordinates refers to ancient maps and texts related to sacred geography, encoded by images of created being or fruits realized as a spiritual experience.The third dimension of the artist's painting is hidden in her magical projections, in peculiar radiographs, where the floral ornament represents traces of wandering along the "upper path".Choosing this "impossible" point of view, we set sail again in the endless variations of Tatiana Yang's art, moving towards Cappadocia and her favorite image – the pomegranate fruit, getting lost in its original meanings, but realizing its sacrificial essence.