Contemporary figurative minimalism is one of the most underappreciated phenomena in the global contemporary art process. Nevertheless, this direction is much more complex and paradoxical than we are used to thinking. The sense of simplicity that arises from interacting with such works should be called completely false, because it arises from the fact that the achievements of figurative minimalism are used by a huge number of industries that literally and totally permeate our everyday lives: interface design, street signs, emojis, children’s colouring books, and much more. However, if we discard our perceptual duckling syndrome, this is the area of artistic practice that has currently concentrated several very powerful and important figures around it, who are defining and rethinking this genre of visual art and taking it beyond its limits through active acts of deconstruction and reinvention.

Varvara Strelnikova is one of them. Her unique digitally figuratively minimalistic works are the most outstanding, complex, and exciting phenomenon for us, the viewers, that the above-mentioned genre can offer. Her works seem to have roots in two radically different historical topics: the post-decorative-applied experiences of the late Matisse and the experiments in artificial synesthesia of the followers of the Bauhaus generation. Her style can be described as restrained, calming, laconic, and focused on everyday aesthetics, while at the same time including signals and signs of our ominous modernity, or, in other words, our ominous reality. One can say that Varvara Strelnikova experiments on the topic of how futile personal escapism can be, how realistic it is to escape from one’s self, and how much the well-being of the picture is fiction or a conscious exercise in awareness and understanding whether I am in the right place, time, and circumstances.

In such works as "Bowl of Plenty,"  "Endeavour,"  "Peacefulness," and "Sensitive Topics,"  the artist dissects the public consensus that has formed around mass interior painting; she seems to open up the origins of this social practice, making visible the production dichotomies: collage and seamlessness, handmade and graphic editors, still life, and the icon on the home screen of the latest iPhone. Varvara Strelnikova’s art is a search for and filling of the gaps between the supposed opposites. Peacefulness is supplied by the subtle anxiety of the chosen colors. Carefree dissolves in the presence of dead colors. Childlike immediacy shines through the undoubted professionalism we see in how the works are actually made. Varvara Strelnikova’s figurative minimalism is a constant questioning of its own nature multiplied by a constant evasion of some external cataloging. It is a very subtle and sophisticated creative strategy, for which we, as art critics, find it difficult to find a conceptual framework. I am amazed at how all the components of a creative career (life path, style, choice of tools, self-promotion tactics) become a kind of aporia, a hymn to the sincerity and incomprehensibility of the human personality.

I warmly recommend that everyone get acquainted with the works of Varvara Strelnikova; this will undoubtedly expand your horizons and give you a unique experience of non-trivial aesthetic experiences.

Jenya Stashkov, Sheffield-based art critic and artist