Monthly Archives: December 2024

The immense Palace Square in St. Petersburg cannot be captured with a glance, it simply does not fit into the eyes.
Yet the artist Yefim Deshalyt managed to do this in a 20×35 cm format while maintaining all sizes and perspectives, everything is here, all the architectural symbols of the Empire of the Russian Tsars: the Winter Palace, now the Hermitage Museum, the Alexandrian Pillar and the Golden Spire of the Admiralty.
It succeeded thanks to the professional specialization of the artist, since Yefim Deshalyt (1921-1996) was the creator of historical diorama-panoramic projects.
In the mid-50s the artist worked on the creation of the revolutionary diorama ‘Storming of the Winter Palace, 1917’ it was a big honorable state order, but this etude he made only for himself.
This oil etude (painted in 1957) is framed as a precious artifact in a box-shaped frame and protected by the finest museum glass.

Just as Rembrandt’s “Titus at his Desk” keeps reading and daydreaming, reading again and dreaming further in the continuous present tense, so Natalya Zaloznaya’s girl with a fork eats and enjoys, eats and enjoys in the grammatical form of Present Continuous – in a continuously continuing action.

The painting “With a Fork”, in my opinion, is the artistic peak of the Delight series, in which the author’s concept, with a bit of luck, is happily combined with brilliant expressive execution.
With what luck?! Because the artist experimented with the latest material – fluid acrylic ink, which, even with masterful application, flows where it wants to. But probably because of this, the movement of the girl’s face is so disarming and makes you remember the old word – savoring…

Yeah, but what does Rembrandt and his son have to do with it? Master Natalya Zaloznaya will probably be surprised by my association.

But wait! What about her series My Dutch Heroes: Vermeer, Van Gogh and Rembrandt, which Natalya commented on as follows: “regarding the light… I only remember that my idea was this – Van Gogh is an artist of sunlight, Vermeer – of daylight, Rembrandt – of spiritual light. But this is very monosyllabic, and maybe in this brevity there is a reason for reflection…”

In both canvases, with their frontal composition, lighting, dark background, hands and even sizes, a precious moment of self-contemplation is conveyed. A rarity, in our time, to look inside oneself and be surprised that there is life there, you just need to stop scrolling through Instagram.