(...)The strange texture of a series of paintings treating the same image incites the spectator to approach and inspect their appearances. He or she will notice that the intermingling of the vegetation that makes up their motif vanishes into the thickness and glossiness made by their uneven surface.
What suddenly engages and relegates for a moment the motif, is a pictorial style that mimes more than it paints in order to create a spackled effect that makes the canvas seem like a wall. By making these paintings appear like pieces of an artificially aged fresco, Kristina Irobalieva endows them with a history, an anteriority and an origin that they lack. She makes them into autonomous objects of curiosity that shift in an undefined space, beginning with that which opens up between the appearance of the work and its actual characteristics.
A profound feeling for the instability of our faculties of judgement seems at work in the art of Kristina Irobalieva, which is at once reflexive and poetic. But it is without nostalgia, on the contrary, in order to explore the fictional load contained in the wavering of meaning. Irobalieva says she wishes “to define the form all the while keeping it open.” Her work can also contain a dose of cheekiness when it comes to upsetting that habit of every viewer: the desire to make what he or she sees coincide with what he or she knows. (...)
Marguerite Pilven
January, 2016
Jungle Series 2015 -2017
mixed media on canvas
40 x 40 cm
Exhibition view: Iron Palm, Sator Gallery, Paris
