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| The Empty Subtlety of Tasteful Restraint Maija Rudovska, Art Historian Ieva Iltnere. "Beautiful Fragile Nature" 04.12.-31.01.2009. "Riga Gallery" | |
 Ieva Iltnere. Beatiful Fragile Nature. Acrylic, oil on canvas. 190x230. 2008. | |
| In her exhibition "Beautiful Fragile Nature" Ieva Iltnere continues to explore the themes that she took up a year and a half ago in her solo exhibition "Eight Rooms". The aesthetically over-refined formal manner and androgynous images of the latter exhibition elicited the admiration of Riga art aficionados. With creatures devoid of emotion placed into empty and lonely interiors with beautiful things, Iltnere was attempting to convey the feelings of the contemporary human being - that desert-like existence which has taken over, for many of us truly mentally and physically traversing from one impersonal interior to another, and never finding our own place. The subjects of Iltnere's paintings - cold, alienated and un-human persons, rather like designer furniture - are reminiscent of the "hard" computer-generated graphics that used to be so popular in the ads displayed in various canteens, cafes, bars, etc. The visual space created by Ieva Iltnere can be characterized as a metaphor for the human person's inner world, which is striving to convey the sense of despair that has overwhelmed it in an overloaded information age. Ieva Iltnere is one of those artists whose exquisite and refined style and well thought out imagery is widely recognized in Latvian art circles, and is already acknowledged as her brand. Iltnere's painting has always successfully emulated the artist's personal style - slightly ethereal, also haughty and coolly distant, a quintessence of good taste and the latest fashion trends. For some time I had admired how Iltnere had always been able to perfect and alter her artistic expression, whilst at the same time retaining a consistent style. Tasteful restraint could be the exact words to characterize this style: it is both in the way she chooses to harmonize colour nuances, resulting in a nearly monochrome range (a top-notch skill), and the way decorative and polished figures are used as reference points. Plus an excessive infatuation with materials, more precisely textures, which are infinitely detailed and pleasing to the eye, yet for quite some time now this trend in Iltnere's work seems to have become an end in itself, and somehow pointless. The latest exhibitions clearly prove that trying to not deviate from one's "own" image/style is a difficult feat. It is much easier to stray from this path than to stay on it. "Eight Rooms" was delightful with its fairly precise (or at least partial) strike into the layers of feeling of a present day person, whereas the new exhibition is only a tediously formal repetition, which already, it seems, has lost its topicality. The artist's preoccupation with trifles and details, the tinkering with nuances, fussy daintiness and fashion-able things (as she herself has stated, she is taken with everything that has to do with fur and fluffy things) - is starting to become too obvious, meanwhile losing vitality, as well substance and its artistic purpose. Initially, the images could be associated with the types of phenomena which may be seen in visual culture, which led to a desire to interpret the paintings as a reflection of the image culture of the day. However, the latest paintings demonstrably point to the creative dead-end of this theme. This is obvious when considering the decadent moods and thematic "obstacles", for example, the floods (in "Young and Beautiful" and others), as well as some purely painterly techniques, such as paint washes which, as experimental curiosities, lately seem to have a appeared in the works of several well known Latvian painters. /Translator into English: Anita Načisčione/ | |
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