Tatiana Bugayenko. Mirages

Tatiana Bugayenko is an artist particularly attentive to colour who uses a pure and luminous palette to convey her vision.With free-flowing, radiant coloured patches she renders not objects as such but rather the impressions they engender. Her canvases suggest an effortless, impromptu painting manner, revealing unrestrained movements and rhythmical strokes of the brush. The choice of wet-on-wet, or alla prima, technique and brightly toned grounds allows the artist to create vivid colouristic effects and vary their intensity.

It seems that, in the process of painting, the artworks get in synch with the feelings experienced as inner milestones. The exhibition showcases more than 30 pictures, mostly landscapes. Each of them is akin to a written account of a past experience, although if one were to draw literary parallels, they are more like lyric poetry than prose. What makes Bugayenko’s paintings poetic is their rhythmic tonal structure and the general sense of abstracted emotional soaring. Born in the industrial city of Omsk among the immense flat steppes of Western Siberia where the human eye finds no prominent landmarks to rest on, the artist flees into the realm of colour and light and journeys across the inner and outer worlds. Her landscapes feature NYC and Milan, India and Umbria, Florence and Venice, the Croatian city of Rovinj, the mediaeval Mostar, and many more places visited by Tatiana. The artist easily travels from the real into the imaginary and back. Her summertime Omsk is just as sunlit as the southern cities by the sea.

At times it seems that this mosaic of globetrotting impressions and the atmosphere of the Mediterranean simply reflect the inherent state of inner happiness – a happiness for which, according to a well-known quote, human beings were created. Tatiana Bugayenko’s landscapes – stylised and faintly glimmering and yet figurative and never veering towards abstraction – scintillate and sparkle like mirages somewhere on the horizon of human memories and expectations.