The artistic equinox of Kurakina is at its Zenith. To better say, this artist of rare and highly prized pictorial representativeness crosses time, and makes the observer cross it, crossing the top of cyclical artistic equinoxes. I remember her, rather young and talented surrealist portraitist at the Roman academy, while she was in her frenetic productive season. She was already an artist of a certain future, living in art and, impressed in her paintings, dissolved in the oily colors of the dense brushstrokes, she knew how to involve the observer in the slippery vortex of the depth of dreams. This knowledge of transfiguring any superiority of the subject, in a splendid, yet powerful, graphic renewal of the “theory of the subject”, attracted us to an artistic vertigo where the finality of the gaze remained every time suspended between fantasy and reality. The period of the first part of the 2000s is marked by experimentation on the theories of the Itself of subjectivity.

The production that marks this period is vast, interspersed with surrealist and mythological explosions of considerable impression, and the constant presence of clocks, cages and dark caverns, inhabited by disturbing fairy-tale figures of which only the mood of the gaze could define its emotional fate. Several works from this period are also actually illustrated, which lead to reflection on death.

The painter is then in Zanzibar, in Mexico, London, Moscow, in the United States, then again in Rome, it is the period of transparencies, in which Kurakina almost experiences the disappearance of the subject. Of this new equinox are the broad, measured brushstrokes, the half-lengths and the provocative poses, winking, but as if detached from the dynamism of the structure and entrusted to the breath, at times light and cautious, at other times, overwhelming of life.

It is therefore possible to understand how we find ourselves today in the presence of a new equinoctial cycle, where mythology and tenuity, and strength at the same time, encircle the imposing snap of the animal horde with extreme beauty and elegance, in which fatuous and precarious human figures , struggle without interruption, in order to tame the intense restlessness of the horses. Note the fairy-tale tapestry backgrounds from which the mythological figures emanate, the extreme care of the features of the beasts, a detailed anatomy, which refers to the classic and mystical charm of the great Renaissance authors. The horde emerges chaotic from an equally magmatic and impervious background, they are half prisoners, and half splendidly offered to the viewer in their celebratory poses. The human figures, almost evanescent, are at the mercy of nature, of the power of mysterious and overwhelming forces, a predictive sign of human destiny. The delicate colors contrast strongly with the mythological drama of the scene, which they nevertheless manage to keep suspended and, at the same time, in uncontrolled dynamic action. Time, destiny, the great mysteries of existence have always been the interest of Kurakina. She searched anxiously for them in portraits, in the surreal escapes among the indescribable debris of dreams, through the restless transparencies and the contradictory colors of the overwhelming force of mythologies, of which she was able to intimately read their deep origins.

Author:

Massimo Seymour Montaldi