The Memory Flashes
In a way Ralko’s paintings remind the shots of the old film. Or the aged photographs – not necessarily old, but in a certain condition of scruff. The similar manipulations are performed with the photo images: they are infected with the same virus of the immediate ageing; the fresh image is overlaid with the artificial retouch, which gives it the aristocratic “paleness”; the present looks like it has already become the past. The image is developed on the film by the timing of collecting the cultural archive. Ralko’s painting shows how the same thing can be played with the painted image. Although it “documents” or “reflects” (depends on one’s preferences) the reality in a different way, this image is also a document of a kind, one more round of the unequal battle with the time.
“The Military Sanatorium” series was created in the wake of the holiday impressions: as any other “mnemonist” Vlada treats the past with a special flickering. For an artist with retrospective sight the present is a catastrophe; the brittle memory shivers become the footholds for the world, immersing in the chaos. The antique value becomes the main aesthetical category. Any micro-event, matched with the background of this archive, plunged into the stream of the person’s inner time turns into the biographical fact and becomes the stage…
For Vlada the reflections on these newly-baked facts are also the legal reason to focus on something banal, to lay emphasis on the things seemingly meaningless. The reverse principle of the retrospective reckoning is set in motion: the more “blurred” – the more valuable, the more trivial – the more important. Vlada has to resist the fact that we are still spoiled with the romantic stereotype of “a beautiful object” and “an outstanding event” (in the second case – despite all efforts by the followers of the poetics of banality from Joyce, Musil, Proust to the contemporary portrayers of the everyday life). This sorrowful delusion, this “soaped” sight automatically devaluates not only 99 percent of the visual world, but also 99 percent of our lifetime. “The Sanatorium” reminds something like the resort photographs. Although indeed, unlike the “bright”, carefully edited moments on the screen of the digital camera, the film of our inner archive captures not the “kempt” positions with the posing characters, but the torn edges of what is happening, something private, not intended for the stranger’s eyes. The dowdiness of the motive reminds that, in the great scheme of things, nowadays art is rehabilitating the private side of life, which serves as the hiding place for the human.
Ralko reminds us that memory is fragmentary and its “photoflashes” work unmotivatedly in the most unexpected moments. The absolutely faceless “shots” find their place in her archive because they are the “clues” to some conditions and have the exceptionally personal marking, which is not recognized by others who hence become the “daltonians”. The “women logic” associated with the careful attitude towards one’s own feelings and the permanent listening to oneself is working here. Like the dream of the summer day the icons emerge at a plain turquoise background of the canvas. With their ripple they slide on the surface of time, then stop for a while and disappear again; a certain “momentariness” resides in them – all these nostalgic types supposedly hover in a “point of fluctuation” for a second in order to disappear again, to slip away. One of the Ralko’s painting series was named “The Skim” in order to stress the dynamism of images and emotions associated with her works. Figures, faces, parts of bodies are apparently sucked in the aerodynamic pipe of time, disproving the statement which says that painting is a static, but not temporal kind of art – everything flows here, everything changes. (Viсtoria Burlaka)