die gestalt

Oksana Mas

October 19 — October 30, 2012
Triumph gallery

Will we interpret the name of the new exhibition by Odessa artist Oksana Mas at the Triumph Gallery literally as a translation of the German word Gestalt, meaning form, appearance, image, or will we go into the depths of Gestalt psychology, where the same term means integrity that cannot be reduced to its constituent parts (that is, the whole is always clearly outlined and much more important here individual elements that fill it) — in any case, it turns out that all this is about a clear, indisputable, closed, albeit subjective picture of the world.

To make it clearer, let’s recall Oksana Mas’s most sonorous project "Altar of Nations", shown as part of the 54th Venice Biennale and, on the one hand, a reproduction of the ingenious work of the Northern Renaissance created by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1432, on the other, it is a giant canvas consisting of a myriad of eggs.-pysanok, painted by thousands of people from all over the world. There is one human sin on each egg, except for traditional ones like pride, gluttony and adultery, modern ones such as a pernicious passion for foreign cars, for stuffing demonic tattoos on the body or obsession with Facebook. Leaving aside the analysis of the conceptual component of the project, the important thing here is that from a distance all these biblical and non-biblical subjects are a single colorful indivisible canvas, a holistic picture of the artist’s world.

Yellow expression # 1
2012
Oil on canvas, pencil
120 × 160 cm

To make it clearer, let’s recall Oksana Mas’s most sonorous project "Altar of Nations", shown as part of the 54th Venice Biennale and, on the one hand, a reproduction of the ingenious work of the Northern Renaissance created by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1432, on the other, it is a giant canvas consisting of a myriad of eggs.-pysanok, painted by thousands of people from all over the world. There is one human sin on each egg, except for traditional ones like pride, gluttony and adultery, modern ones such as a pernicious passion for foreign cars, for stuffing demonic tattoos on the body or obsession with Facebook. Leaving aside the analysis of the conceptual component of the project, the important thing here is that from a distance all these biblical and non-biblical subjects are a single colorful indivisible canvas, a holistic picture of the artist’s world.

There is a physical aspect to all this. Mas is, first of all, a painter, albeit with a very wide range of techniques and visual techniques. As with any master of this genre, the painting is a logical continuation of the brush, the brush is directly connected to the fingers, the fingers to the forearm, and so on, until the whole complex of colorful and muscular efforts reaches the main thing − the head, which, again, according to gestalt, guarantees the closeness of the procedure.