In Victoria Kovalenchikova's paintings there are two worlds: the exterior and the interior, the real and also the feelings read over it. Her paintings are juxtapositions of abstractions and the figurative. Often the world of objects is disturbed by levitated forms, abstract forms that in her capable hands may well symbolize the emotional and the sensational energies of the world. In these paintings feelings, emotions and the inscrutabilities of life have tangibly and massively become present. The flesh is hidden beneath the force of its energies and powers. In her paintings the transformation of the consensual and the well adumbrated forms, through perilous amalgamations, make for fantastic dimensions.

Measure for measure the real is at the mercy of our sensations and perceptions. We see the world through infinite prisms of powers that we can neither verbalize nor reify objectively. The forms, in Kovalenchikova's hands, swiftly shift from the realm of objects to their spheres of mysterious and the unknown. Not since Georgio de Chirico has an artist been so capable of maintaining the objective world and also transforming it through the infinite illusions that transcend the reality of our myopic constructions of reality. A reality we often ignore and refuse to acknowledge, lest we are surprised by the absence of order. The existential metaphors of her paintings lay bare the infinite possibilities of modalities and of inward realizations. Her painting "Autumn Wind" is a peregrination into the energy and the hidden powers of forms, be these energies innate or imported by the reader. "The Golden Day Triptych" is a symphony of colors, astonishingly fertile in its emotional and intellectual suggestions.

In the above two paintings the emotional key to her work is the uncanny sense of relating between abstraction and the figurative. Larry Rivers and Rauschenberg, among many others, had coalesced the two, but never as a cohesive and unitary phenomenon. In Kovalenchikova's paintings the amplitude of interior and the exterior spaces suspend our logic and heighten ambiguities, gracefully and yet restlessly; subtly and transparently. Her kind of abstraction exalts the figurative and creates a spatial rapture. The figures are easy to read and yet the poetic juxtaposition of the two evokes a profound sense of the sublime. The genius of her paintings lie in the fact that these two antipodal worlds are intimately familiar; like a strange dream and its dreamer.

In "Autumn Wind" and "The Golden Day Triptych" the fiery landscapes signal the end of ends and beginnings . The red and the inflamed landscapes are furnaces of passions and awaken a sense of sempiternal energies. The images and the forms are shaped by dreams and formulated by emotions. We are at a loss for words caught by the phenomenal mystery of life, emotions and all that lies beyond. Her images are partly concealed by their own extensions and implications. The emotional or the abstract dissembles the figurative and the objective and vice versa. We are driven upward, all the gravity is denied and the colors cast are the atmosphere of visions. There is such abundance of energies and such inquietude, all evoked by the imperatives of our visions. They are in short illuminations and metaphysical spaces read from within and without. They are divinely made and divinely destroyed.

"The Bridge", an ordinary and the quotidian urban landscape, comes to life, almost forebodingly, through the intrusions of abstract forms. This is also true of the "Seize the Day" where her poetic melding of gestural acts is an electrifying source of ambiguity and mystery.

Abbas Daneshvari, Ph.D.
California State University, Los Angeles