...The work of the painter Nataliya Zemlyanaya continues the tradition of Russian avant-garde, mainly the school of Michael V. Matyushin and Pavel N. Filonov that she adopted from her teachers and colleagues Alexandr P. Zaycev, Lyudmila V. Kutsenko, and Vladimir P. Povarov. Impulses of the original life impressions are revealed through the shapes related to an abstraction and still correlating to its original image. Colour motion and its pulsation create a unique spatial extension and deepness. The geometry of figures exposes the penetrating image schemes forming a facet and folded structure that reminds a crystal or some other organic forms.
The multiplying and glittering, alternating and splintering-off, melting and swelling with colours mysterious creatures taken in the turns of flats and the raw of rhythms live in the deepness of the painting’s sheet. Purple, amber, smoke blue, brown and hunter green colours run with little streaks on the textile of colourfully patterned carpet, penetrating with its sharp edges, joining in the geometric figures and decaying with a cascade of lines and dots.
The abstraction in this case was created from the experience of the colour living in its geometrical extension, rhymed by the lives of the surfaces and Mӧbius structures. The forms get pupated, become transparent, like when another life could be seen under an almost-translucent and fragile like a crystal tunic, and alter the space into a multifold and extended one (“Crystal in the water”). The scales of colour roll in and sparkle with an eye-catching plumage and a waterfall of shades that shape the intricate patterns likewise exotic tropic flowers (“Iris”).
A colours’ bedding, a steady variability of multiplying and always developing shapes and sophisticated combination of the figures imply a highly organized composition in general, a retention of the only background of the message and the final decision. It is a decision that exists and denotes summing all polychromy and complexity of the forms by the geometric shapes, likewise on the icon a circle, cross, diamond or square gives the starting point to the composition. Still, all these summing figures are not predominant ones, as it is in Suprematism. Instead, they are dispersed all over the space of the paintings, echoed in different shapes and vanished in the endlessness of variations like in a kaleidoscope. Due to its restless multipart composition of highly organized cellular space, its rugosity and fragmentation, the paintings are closer to Pavel N. Filonov’s Analytical Art. At the same time, with its free structure of the composition and focus on the extending volumetrically spatial expression of the colour, its pulsations in the tracing each other flats of the forms, it also refers to the ideas of Michael V. Matyushin.
The white colour has its great importance in the artist’s works. Development of the white tone gives a special lightness and transparency, permeability of covers and airiness of colour scheme’s blend. Besides, white colour discovers a lot of shades and tones and like a limpid piece of ice it absorbs the other colours and gets sated with brightness. The original motive of the painting subject can be hidden in its forms with no reveal of any kind of concrete points. The developing forms can be considered aimless: free geometrical ornament, the correlations of the flats and rhythms, alternating like a mysterious blend on the edge of a stone, but still it refers us to its image living in it. There is always an analytical beginning of the forms, still a little bit angular, sharp and shifted one that structures the composition into an architectonic one. Pursuing a volumetrically spatial expression of the colour with its restless and light transparency is the typical feature for Zemlyanaya’s works. It is the reveal of her deep interest to the Vladimir V. Sterligov’s art and his concept where the constructing the space has its vivid expression and development and, moreover, becomes a trend in Sterligov’s art.
Nataliya Zemlyanaya synthesizes a tradition of Russian avant-garde and its followers and seeks to find her own style where she could demonstrate an important link of her paintings to her first-hand vital and natural experiences, developing the wide poetic correlations and metaphysical depth