About the artist

STRANGER

Obscure secrets I'm entrusted
Somebody else's sun I'm handed
And every of my soul's meanders
Is transfixed by a bitter wine.

  Alexander Blok

Michele Foucault proclaimed contemporary art to be dead. It seems it is impossible to be an artist in the world where everything has been said by classics and any attempt to climb their ladder would be considered as an absurd. However, the presence of modern artists tells us that the talent for creativity can never die, as the humanity will continue to indulge in the therapy of creating. It is something that will always remain an inevitable and existential need for survival.

Ludmila Popenko is an artist who proves French Philosophy wrong as well. She is a star in her own way. Her light does not blind, as it is free from that disastrous radiation, emanated by the primes of radical arts. At the same time Ludmila is neither a marginal, nor a looser. She is a remarkable and successful artist, who masterfully defined her independent niche within Moscow art scene, being recognized by collectors. Success is attractive in its nature. People are usually eager to bathe in the blaze of glory; therefore, success is also a symptom – of the “disease” that constitutes our society's life and what our contemporaries demand.

Contemporary Art does not necessarily mean “present” as a moment of time. In the art world the term “contemporary” stands for a specific direction of consciousness. Contemporary mind, and the art it creates, is the consciousness based on faith in progress, thus, in future, thus, in some fair world order. During the times when faith in progress was gone the Art performs as a weapon to transform world and society. It promised to build The Kingdom of Good in the space of a given eternity while substituting the religion with its faith in the Coming. However, while marching triumphantly, humankind discoverd The Kingdom of Truth’s horizon to be nothing else, but a roughly-daubed background, a decoration. Ludmila Popenko is an artist who looks back and gazes into this disappearing nebula of the gone era. The same way traditional painters are trying to capture the last gleams of nature in order to render it later, filtering it through the space of their own subjectivity.

Viktor Misiano, a famous European curator and theorist, says that one of the peculiarities of contemporary art is the recurrence to the complex narratives. “Ability to construct a story attributes to the times of stability, when a well-ordered narrative recognizes itself in well-ordered picture of the world and firmness of social order. Such ability becomes more demanded when the world stability comes after Dark Ages and tries to hide its unsteadiness and uncertainty. Some artists relate ability for storytelling, i.e. the construction of multipronged and scaled artwork, to their "second biography". They enter the scene at the times when narration is not able to cope with reality, absorbed by catastrophic events and frantic velocities".

History is impossible without memories. Remembrance is the main theme in Popenko’s art. Her mysterious task is to get into the skin of her personages and show how they visually perceived themselves many years ago. The eyes of modern people observe the world through various sources of Mass Media, where digital cameras and computers form their world-view. It is always hard to imagine how people saw themselves in the fifteen century, for example. Old pictures of grandparents can be used only as an evidence of the older times, when photography was not Art but a document. Despite the conditional character, these documents show the path of genuine life. This is why Ludmila Popenko uses old photography as the base of her paintings.

All of us have turned over the pages of old photo albums of our family and friends during the moments when there is nothing to talk about, and the tea is not served yet. The most curious thing in the process of flickering through yellow dusty pages is the connection between you and strangers in the pictures. Given the intimate nature of photography, you unwillingly become involved in their lives. Ludmila understands that feeling completely. She looks for all sorts of pictures: highly artistic, plain, antique or simply old ones and transfers them into the paintings. This allows Popenko to level out a connection with reality, with pulse of life and death, which is the essential quality of photographic image and what Roland Barthes called punctum. Translating photography into painting is basically transferring “the privacy of photography” to the “public image”. Thus, the dramatic concept of her paintings is based on the conflict between the intimacy of photographic genre and representativeness of the painting. This “shamelessness” creates that particular attraction in Popenko’s paintings that makes her stand out against a background of modern painters. The word “shamelessness” does not necessarily mean the use of obscene imagery. On the contrary, the painter explores the themes of her paintings in quite prim way in comparison with other art works. The power of Ludmila’s paintings lies in the erotic tension, which she creates through the exposure of everyday intimacy to the publicity of painting. Her art is fulfilled with inherent sexuality. Thus, an exposed ankle of austerely dressed woman in 1890s can excite much more than a shameless picture of billboard advertising. Ludmila’s method is well demonstrated in the painting called “Stranger” (2004). It is more than just a photographic image, translated into painting. It is the artist’s fantasy, where she shows that the painting is nothing else, but an ordinary photo shot. The image of a stranger here refers unambiguously to the similar poem by Blok that manifests latent desire.

However, not all of Ludmila’s paintings are so ambiguous. Among the canvases where female libido shimmers through Popenko's favorite silvery tint, there are some works picturing the kiss. Strong expression of these images combined with bright, saturated colors contradicts the usual soft and quiet composition of Ludmila’s paintings. It seems that her female characters threw off their normal prudency and good manners to let powerful temper out. Meanwhile, viewers feel slightly voyeuristic, witnessing somebody’s intimate moment. The choice of the kiss over any other private moment is describable as it manifests sexuality in such a bold way. Jean-Luc Godard, who was unable to tolerate obscenity in cinema, thought the kiss is "the most intimate, the most personal thing … something that looks abominable in movies. Sex can be studied, filmed and painted, just like love, but kiss remains an image of utmost intimacy, demonstrating how feeling expels through the body, and realizes physiologically". The “kiss” has been analyzed in Popenko’s paintings not only because it reveals the hidden desire, more importantly, it portrays her working method through the optics of linear history. The kiss shows the discreetness of sexuality. On one hand, it tears time apart like a flash or a gunshot; on the other, the kiss equals infinity for those who felt it. In other words, the kiss is that point of time when the eternity converges into unity. Perhaps, this is what Jean-Luc Godar spoke about, when revealing the kiss as the obscenity in cinematography. Ludmila’s method of work with photography is hidden in it. The artist tells a story where every painting is a separate topic, captured by the flash out of the daily routine. These images possess two distinctive features: first, they leave a sense of incompleteness and reticence that makes viewers wonder what happens next to the personage; and, second, the works represent those points of time, when Goethe exclaimed: “Stand still the instant!” These moments do not have to feature something important to be beautiful. Being taken from continuous and homogeneous depth of objective reality, they are beautiful because they reach eternity, always new, always contemporary.

It is appropriate to remember “diary” as a genre. In fact, Popenko’s impressive arsenal of photo albums is visual diaries of a family. Diary is an honest self-portrait. In this case, Ludmila’s art can be shown as a projection of her own ego into the different epoch, which she might seem closer to spiritually, or as an attempt to win out her inner dramas and conflicts. Most of the painters might see their art as a self-portrait, replicating Flaubert silently by saying: "Madame Bovary is myself". If the French Master identified himself with his heroine during the times when women were far from being equal with men, it is obvious Ludmila reflects herself in the paintings working exclusively with female images. Moreover, those who know Ludmila personally would agree that she has a 1920-ies look. All her images represent one woman per se; hence, the identification of the master’s “I” with her alter ego is obvious. However, Ludmila’s strong resemblance with her images could not be taken for granted. She maintains a certain distance between the characters and herself. Ludmila is not a naïve, weak artist, who can get stuck in the story. She is a member of Moscow Artist Union, whose works decorate museums, corporate and private collections. She participates in numerous exhibitions, including seventeen personal shows, while winning prizes for artistic achievements. In other words, Popenko managed to produce something under the circumstances of the cultural crisis, in the reign of kitsch and trash, being demanded by the public tired of both brutal actuality and plastic pseudo-realism. And if she yields to temptation of picturing purely superficial beauty, then she is encoding it by distancing herself from the painting through the language of the medium – photography, in this case. Thus, it is unquestionable that Ludmila Popenko is a carrier of the contemporary consciousness.

“…I am neither a marginal to professional community nor I am a stranger to my own heroes, to the world created at my canvas. This is what I love. This is the world that I am carried away by my dreams: poetic, artistic, sexual… And, aren’t my characters the type of woman I see myself belonging to? How can I find the necessary distance…?” (Ludmila Popenko)

The word “distance” is crucial here. It is directly connected to the term “representation”. As mentioned above, Ludmila, being a sincere artist, longs for a true expression of her female world. It is a fact that “female world” in the contemporary culture is something, dictated by men. Do not women look the way men want them to? Nevertheless, Ludmila creates a picture of male desire in the light of women’s standpoint. The distance, that she is using to move her away from the image and analyze it, is originated from the alliance between men’s world-view and women’s prospective on it. It is significant she does not feel as a documentary image maker. Ludmila does not use digital equipment when creating the canvases, in other words, the painting is not a document for her, but an image. The drama of her creativity is about self-identification. It unfolds around one main question: “Where am I?” Is she inside the character or outside the painting? Ludmila might not answer the question, being afraid that it would eventually close the borders that let her in those trans-painterly journeys of hers. That’s why she is covering her tracks by creating a mediating system. Her space is a space of a photographic image with a blurry background, sunk in a silvery fog. The characters in these dissolving views are too realistic, actually. There is almost a slight move in their static nature. It looks as if they are ready to leave artificial world and walk out of the borders of the painting. When working with a readymade photography as a first reality, Ludmila is trying to express that secondary nature of her own image as the matter of presence. Transforming photography into painting to her is more than just an articulation of the profane art or a linguistic game, which can be easily found in the works of romantic conceptualists. It is more a moment of existential experience. Just like the decadent heroes of Wilde or Carroll, she lives in two worlds at the same time: beyond and behind the canvas. You will never know which world she belongs to. Thereby, her poetic manner can be defined as: Connection VS Remoteness and Love VS Hate.

Ludmila Popenko offers viewers something consonant to their hidden desires. The world she creates meets not only our desires, but hers, as well. However, the attractive content is not enough to define the charm of Ludmila’s work. The painter shows virtuosity in working with the shapes that express the hazy romantic mood of her characters. There is always a theatrical impression from her images. Popenko pictures not just women, but actresses who are playing various roles: from a lady to a Dutch maid. Truffaut said that there is always an area to explore in cinematography. Painting is no different for the movies in this sense. Ludmila Popenko is performing the same research but in the form of a show.

Any documentary shows human in certain life situation, within certain plastic perspective. People understand Popenko’s way of presenting work when noticing that her image is not a real person, but a character – an actress, a passenger etc. This kind of encoding makes Ludmila’s paintings cinematic. In fact, the artist implies that almost every painting refers to a particular movie. For instance, Ludmila’s "On the platform" reinterprets a scene from Jacques Demy’s "Umbrellas of Cherbourg", where Catherine Deneuve is running across the platform. A female image from the painting “Nanook” refers to Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North" movie of 1922. The citation method that is observed in most of Popenko’s works is common for postmodernists. Usually, modern artists are either citing predecessors within the depths of the own visual language or simply break the painting space with aggressive inserts adopted from other practices. Popenko does it in a different way. She merges cinematography and artistic painting, artfully disguising the stitching, so that the rupture remains invisible to the viewers, but still gloaming from the depth of artwork. Meanwhile, Ludmila shows that her paintings are the scenes from the movies unknown to the viewers, but familiar to her when using movie episodes as the first reality. She becomes a director with a brush in her hand.

Godard said that cinema offers us a world that corresponds to our desires. In this sense, cinematography is narrative, hence, it is impossible without a story, mostly linear. All attempts to deprive cinema of this quality remained as avant-garde and never belonged to the mainstream. Thus, painting has certain advantages over cinema limitations. Ludmila does not trust linear history as any over artist of XXI century, so she deprives cinema of its narrative when engaging viewers into creative process to finish the story, and, as a result of this, become a part of it. Once again: “There is no need to write history, as we are written by it ourselves".  

Bogdan Mamonov
Moscow (2008)
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Translated by Evgenia Belyavski
New York (2009)