Kyiv’s Yaroslavna Gallery exhibits Briansk artist Natalka Salista
Thus behold the town of Briansk (according to the encyclopedia it has over 400,000 inhabitants, machine building, a steel casting factory, etc., God knows what really), the family of artists, a drawing child. On the one hand, it looks like everything is quite clear — what child does not draw? However, starting from the age of seven little Natasha Salista (this is the name of our heroine — now, though, already not Natasha for a long time but Natalka) has been not simply drawing but “taking up creative activity.” At the age of ten a personal exhibition was arranged for her, and the local media were writing about her. Was it worth hurrying so much? This is an old and perhaps insoluble question.
In one way or another the little person who entered the Briansk Art School was one who had already found fame (locally). Moreover, she had already tasted this fame (which is much worse). It is hard to judge her drawings of that time, because to evaluate, in fact, the child’s creative work by the criteria applicable to the creative work of an adult (though at times it is cast — pretentiously, sometimes even too pretentiously — into adult forms) is simply dangerous. Sometimes fast spiritual maturation occurs, and sometimes, if we can say so, a spiritual acceleration. Sometimes something much more terrible happens — when the child is artificially pushed into growth like a hyacinth. Nevertheless, by the age of 15 not only fairy tales were already illustrated but also Lesia Ukrayinka, Wilde and (why on earth not?) Goethe. Once again a personal exhibition, newspaper articles. What next?
Strange and sad, but the impression appeared that there was nothing further. Of course, a host of facts are brought forward, and the picture composed of them looks like rather successful — after Briansk she studied in St. Petersburg, exhibited, came into contact with St. Petersburg experimental psychologists (according to their method the problems of children were solved with the help of fairy-tale therapy — the child was asked to express him/herself in fixed images), and designed clothes for dancers. There is nothing from all this at the current Kyiv exhibition in the Yaroslavna Gallery. After illustrations to Faust, the break was a full decade and a half. The gap, it goes without saying, is not small. It makes you dizzy when you look at it. Natalka Salista herself still does not realize it — or maybe does not want to. She called her exhibition Harmony.
What the artist is doing now definitely falls into two streams — or if you like, into two manners. In the words of Natalka Salista herself, she is passing quite painlessly from one to the other (is that why Harmony?). Good if it were this way, as the dissimilarity is striking. On the one hand — boringly academic realistic landscapes and still lifes. On the other — whitewashed fantasies with fairies in wide hats and with big bouquets; the artist and her energetic surrounding call these works of the second type meditative art. Obviously, the abundance of the relevant oriental terminology is supposed, although they managed without it at the exhibition, reduced themselves to The Dream and The Fairy Takes a Walk.
Many people like the exhibition in Yaroslavna. Adult spectators are touched. Children wish happiness to the steady tin soldier. I would wish happiness to the Centerville Ghost. Incidentally, just like tin soldier, it was created almost twenty years ago.
