Natalia Zourabova:
Living in Painting

Kobi Ben-Meir
 

Ever since Natalia Zourabova started painting, she has focused primarily on the interior of her home. In all her different apartments over the years, in Moscow, Berlin, Be'er Sheva, and Jaffa, one can sense the long hours spent in observing and painting, while the windows and doors open a porthole to changing environments outdoors. The gaze at a new setting is a means of adapting to it, and Zourabova discovers the place through painting; moreover: through depiction of the domestic interior, she discovers painting.
Zourabova excels at constructing complex large-scale compositions - perhaps the greatest challenge in painting. In the history of art, such dimensions are mostly reserved for historical paintings. Her works may be deemed historical paintings about unimportant stories, set against the backdrop of domestic spaces occupied by chairs, carpets, and flowerpots. The spaces she portrays bear traces of small occurrences and memories, such as a coat left by someone on the chair, laundry waiting to be folded, or a picture painted years ago, hanging on the wall. Zourabova's subject is the chance occurrences of a life detached from the world of painting, occurrences in the domestic space that converge into potential compositions. Interior depictions tie the home to the studio, life to work. The painting is executed in a familiar, loved place, but at the same time it pits the challenges of life against those of painting. Every moment spent at home is a time of studying the painting while mapping the space. One can imagine Zourabova reclining on the living room sofa in the evening, visualizing how the space becomes a painting and asking herself: "How far is the table from the wall? What is the color of the vase on the table? How will the painting look if I move the vase to the pantry? Maybe I should add something blue on the left."
In the interiors, Zourabova finds her voice as a painter. To paint the room she is in, she approaches the object of painting as if she were facing a painting. Through the long observation and by delving into the nuances, the three-dimensional space becomes a vividly colored two-dimensional picture. In Yellow Table, Jaffa (2023), for example, her familiarity with the carpet pattern is evident, as is an intimacy that allows for disorder, such as dirty cups not yet taken for washing, or a pillow with a painting of a camel left upside down. This is not a description of a place, however, but a painting: the vertical perspective makes it unequivocally clear that we are not faced with a three-dimensional space, but a two-dimensional surface on which paint is applied, and the paint-dabs of purple and green - does not record reality. To argue that Zourabova's color articulates her feelings would also be simplistic, since her painting engages with painting, and not with the artist, her life, or her surroundings. The color surfaces are purple and green because the painting and the composition demanded these specific colors.

Throughout the history of art, the theme of interior served painters to experiment with new modes of expression. In 17th century Netherlands, the interior gained centrality as a theme that reflects the life of the rising bourgeoisie and the ethos of Protestant Christianity. In small-scale paintings that depicted domestic interiors, with or without the human presence of their dwellers, artists such as Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Samuel van Hoogstraten observed the social, class, and gender order in the Netherlands of their time. The "small" subject of interior - in contrast to paintings on historical and religious subjects or commissioned portraits, which are more expensive and complicated to make - was an excellent "low risk" platform to explore new channels that might turn out to be failed or subversive in retrospect. At the same time, the interior made it possible to develop perspectival and optical means, which contributed to perfecting painterly skills in a two-dimensional description of a three-dimensional space, and obtaining realism of color, light, and texture. Many of the Dutch Golden Age interiors refer to the medium of painting through a reflexive gaze at the paintings hanging on the walls of the house - often well-known paintings of their time, through which the artists pay homage to fellow painters. The windows, mirrors, and world maps prevalent in these interiors likewise allude to painting, this time indirectly, being - like painting - two-dimensional surfaces that present or simulate a three-dimensional space.
Modernism too - at least one of its main channels - was born out of the interior genre. Artists such as Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard used it to formulate a new painterly language, characterized by non-mimetic coloration and an application of paint that deliberately blurred the illusion of space, in a way that subordinates the three-dimensional space to the two-dimensional medium. Most of Vuillard's paintings depict figures in domestic settings, but his fundamental choice of a decorative approach eliminates the hierarchy between the different elements in the painting, between subject and background, giving equal painterly treatment to each area: the patterning of the carpet is just as important as the figure's facial features, since each element in the composition is a unique display of color and texture. The figures in his paintings, which resemble clusters of brushstrokes on the painting surface, are embedded in the domestic space as if they were inanimate objects placed in the composition. The subject in his paintings is less important than the feelings it conveys through the application of the paint - feelings of intimacy and introspection that are possible in a tranquil setting.

Zourabova's paintings clearly attest to their engagement with the medium of painting and its history. Like her predecessors, she too, often includes windows in her paintings - frames similar in shape to the picture frames - through which another painted space is seen. That space sometimes looks less like a landscape seen through a window, and more like a landscape painting hanging on a wall. Paintings within paintings are also common in her work. Through this motif she contemplates the labor of painting as an act of remembering little stories from the past and other times of painting, as another link in the long chain of the history of painting. In At Home, Evening (2023), for example, the artist's partner is seen engrossed in work, while a painted portrait of her daughter hangs on the wall behind him. The room is the same living room depicted in Yellow Table, Jaffa - except that here, as demanded by this painting, the wall is not purple, but orange. The portrait's orange background is virtually swallowed up by the wall behind it, and the painting seems to fade into the painted wall of the house. It is a serene family portrait of a painted spouse, a daughter painted in the past, and a painter who paints now. Painting is Natalia Zourabova's home.
 
Haifa, 2024

English translation:
Daria Kassovsky