The paintings were created to reflect the “chivalrous motto”, “La Vie en Rose” (Life in Rose). I convey the message in my paintings via this motto: don’t lose hope, keep noticing and observing beauty, enjoy the triumph of moments amidst the impermanence of the world.

Each piece was conceived as something unimaginably beautiful and desirable, like a precious stone or an alloy. Simultaneously, I wished to make the paintings alive and moving, changeable, independent, having their very own history. The world depicted on the canvases seems beautiful and light, festive and solemn. But the illusion disappears once you look at the works and engage in a dialog with them. Bright and baroque, the paintings move and fall apart into fragments, grow horns, scales, feathers… acquire their own character and will. This duality makes them attractive and repulsive at the same time, and makes you look closely, discovering new details.

The paintings portray the chaos of the world as its distinctive feature. The very manner of painting reflects this impermanence. I sought to equalize the aesthetics of harmony and imperfection. Within the pictorial language itself, I created a deliberate conflict between the beautiful, plastic, noble – and the rough, nervous, fractured. I was selecting specific “ideal” images from Renaissance and Baroque paintings, combining and colliding them with each other, destroying and reassembling them. These artistic phases are synonymous for me with deliberate beauty and high, unattainable ideals, and I take images from them as metaphors and allegories for my work. Through them and the figurative language I tried to find the main nerve of the concept of each painting.

In this series I continued my experiments with painting as a phenomenon. Painting here is in an intense state of transition from figurative to abstract, showing the changing essence of things, the borderline state of the world. A significant part of my practice is not working with the subject, but with the pictorial language, with the way paint is applied to the canvas. I often level the spatial effect, leave open broad strokes, sweeps, deliberately emphasizing that the painting is an illusion, just an idea or a state.

Dasha Maltseva

Dasha Maltseva’s exhibition “Life in Rose” is a single story with a sequence of halls and large-scale paintings creating the atmosphere of a neglected palace. Pompous, solemn images, referring to the Renaissance and Baroque eras, disintegrate, and become distorted, like memories. In this whirlwind of painting, the viewer’s eye clings, anchor-like, to individual details that the artist adds to the paintings with special aestheticism.

Meanwhile, the rebellious, tense painting by Dasha Maltseva remains ascetic in mood. Following the tradition of past epochs, her paintings are allegories, morals and lessons. The viewer is required to immerse themselves carefully to reveal all the shades of meaning. The great beauty and its decay, the impermanence of the world and the inevitability of time are the main motifs of the exhibition.

A tour of the palace begins in a room decorated with a ceiling fresco and a ceremonial equestrian portrait. This room is a cross between a boudoir for a private reception and a Parisian salon (le Salon), a place where art is discussed. The viewer is then ushered into the spacious fireplace room. The fireplace is a symbol of the home, with portraits of ancestors, family heirlooms and trophies placed next to it. The apotheosis of this hall is a six-meter high painting La Vie en Rose with motifs of hunting and crusades. And further on is the fountain, which adorns the interiors of the palace and at the same time serves as a place for ablutions before visiting the house temple. The exhibition ends with an altar where the famous allegories of the crucifixion and El Greco’s 16th century “Burial of the Count of Orgaz” are read. A peculiar point of the exhibition is a small-scale work with a grape, it is like the final note and the essence of the whole play.

Curator: Nadya October

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