Evguenia Men's Page

Website

www.evmmen.com

Relationship status

married

College / University

Junior art school, Saint-Petersburg Institute of Cinematography and Television, Russia

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Digital, Film, Painting, Photography, Video

About my artwork

Love…Hatred…Jealousy…Desperation…Joy…Passion…
I paint the human soul as it experiences both grief and joy. The human soul is an enormous secret world that becomes visible for the artist through perceiving and painting the essence of visible objects. I interpret human emotions by juxtaposing colours of my subjects. When in desperation I may see red as black, yellow as grey, or blue as brown. Objects are distorted, sugar is bitter, and peaches are tasteless. I paint grief turning to joy, for example, by showing an open red and black mouth screaming out white pearls.
To me art is a confession. All of my soul’s emotions are in my heart and blood – they move to my body’s rhythm - and I choose subjects as external interpretations of those feelings. I must be as close to my subjects as possible; so close that I can eat them or get inside them and thus almost every all my work is done as a close-up. I arrange canvases in awkward sets in order to give the feeling of my subjects in motion.

CLOSE-UP
When is it possible to touch beloved objects? Coming really close to them is the answer… As close as possible!
Close-up means the possibility of touching. As a result of touching comes knowledge and possession.
Seeing an object from a distance does not give the possibility of touching it. Therefore it is impossible to know it and possess it. Technically, only close-ups allow us to see things from the shortest distance, or from no distance at all.

OBSESSION (I love, therefore I touch)
To love objects means to touch objects. Because physically ‘touching’ means ‘knowing’, touching gives knowledge of the objects. Passion for objects creates the feeling of wanting to touch everything I want to possess. The more things are created by people or nature, the stronger is the greed to possess. Because it is never enough!

KNOWLEDGE (I love, I touch, therefore I know)
Objects are alive. Objects interact with each other. They penetrate into each other. Objects exchange colors, energies and lives. Only close-ups give the possibility of touching objects and feeling relationships between them. Close-up opens the opportunity of knowing the mystery of lives of the objects by getting deeply inside the interaction between them.

POSSESSION (I love, I touch, I know, therefore I possess)
It is impossible to possess an object if I cannot keep it. It is impossible to possess all people I see, all nature I see, all the small and big objects I experience in their material existence. Moreover, it is not interesting. One loves something now, but one may lose the love later. The first time I see things, I fall in love, but I may lose my passion later (as it often happens with passionate people). To keep my feelings in eternity, I fix them spiritually in paintings. I fix my first-sight love straight on the canvas. Then, when I get bored with the objects, my painting has my energy, my feelings and my love. It means that I do possess the object spiritually and materially.

MOVEMENT
Why are paintings arranged in sets? Why the shape of the painting is awkward? I have no answer. It is just a feeling that it is right. The imagination of objects is always in an awkward shape and is always incomplete in my mind. Besides, putting canvases together gives a strong feeling of movement of the objects. My ultimate goal is to produce paintings as big as a movie theatre screen, but in an awkward shape.

The centre of the artworld is

New York, London, Berlin, online

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http://www.artreview.com/profile/EvgueniaMen
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