Natalia Zourabova: Sooner or Later

Literally, the phrase “sooner or later” means “sometime, one day.” However it also connotes that eventually, one way or another, something is about to happen, implying that a deus ex machina or the hand of fate will reach out and bring the story to its end, and there will be a consequence to the chronicle. Nevertheless, this is merely an assumption, and, “sooner or later,” we may realize that there is no consequence, or that we are unable to understand it, or have nothing to do with it.

A flimsy, almost invisible, somberness hovers over the daily, seemingly banal scenes of Natalia Zourabova’s In Search of a Lake paintings. Behind this somberness, lurks a stoic acceptance of the validity of the phrase “sooner or later.” And it is this very ghost-like latency and immateriality that is so menacing, far more than a pistol that appears in the first act of a play and is expected to be fired before the final curtain.

The painter Natalia Zourabova, her mathematician husband, Fyodor, and their daughter Ester live in the Ramot neighborhood in Beer Sheva near Fyodor’s workplace, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Theirs is a story that neither begins with “Once upon a time” nor ends with “happily ever after.” Family Zourabov’s life is conducted within the grayish nonce of new immigrants living in a strange as well as self-estranged country, as their life is being eroded within lonesome and alienated bubble. This same existence – between daily routine and minor occurrences/excitements – is mirrored in the cinematically inspired frozen scenes Natalia Zourabova portrays on her canvases.

Zourabova’s paintings present themselves as pairs or diptychs of “before” and “after”: “take” 1 – “cut” – “take” 2. Find the differences, or complete the missing parts. Sooner or later, we are bound to find out who shot whom and who fell down, and when did the pistol of the first act become a deadly smoking gun.

In Andy Warhol’s (1928-87) Before and After painting, 1960, a woman is having a nose job in order to look like an idolized movie star. In Step-on can with leg, 1981, by Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97), a high-heeled female leg pushes down the pedal of a garbage can decorated with red flowers. One painting shows the can with its lid raised; the other with its lid closed. The invisible waste had been dumped into the flowery can, and order has been reinstated. There is no place for abjection in American pop culture. Beauty and cleanliness make up the surface of the society of the spectacle. By contrast, in Natalia Zourabova’s diptychs, one does not know what came first, her world does not consist of “star dust,” glamour and fame. There isn’t a momentarily disturbed order that should be restored swiftly, effectively, and technically-materially. Her existential-intellectual somberness results from the realization that even though an event depicted in one painting may seem changed in another painting, sooner or later we have to admit and accept the fact that the human condition has not changed one bit: It is congealed, stuck and deadlocked. There aren’t any instantaneous solutions.

Based on this view and as a result of the psychic and existential need to survive the grayness of life, her paintings don a colorful outlook. Not unlike Cinderella, her “extras” become “stars until midnight.” Going to a playground, to the municipal swimming pool, waiting at a bus stop, roaming the streets of Beer Sheva, or window-shopping in a mall, turn into “dramas,” into climaxes of two-frame films.

Natalia and her family live in a film, perhaps even in an animated one. Her yearning soul soars like a footloose bird on the imaginary southern wind blowing in her wings. Beer Sheva’s scorching heat – so different from the snowy chill of her native town Moscow – melts her canvases and send them, as it were, on a colorful psychedelic trip.

But Natalia Zourabova does not indulge in romantic or sentimental hallucinations. Her paintings are imbued with irony, mainly structured and intelligible self-irony of a young artist who is well aware of the ironic aspects of contemporary art. Her paintings offer poignant narratives about life in an age of over-consumption, relocations, and hyper-alienation in the global society of the spectacle, in a country in which identity politics are sort of foreplay, and in a milieu replete with xenophobia and racism.

In an asthmatic age, whose culture is characterized by shortness of breath (zapping, “clippiness,” reductiveness, and miniaturization), her paintings-stories are a visual counterparts of short and compact SMS messages. Her diptychs tell an open-ended story squeezing a whole world of emotions, feelings, disappointments, indifference, and despair into two mute frames that do not divulge what came first, what are the causes and what are the effects, what has happened and what is going to happen. This animated action and practicality emerge as “yarn,” or urban legends, span into static animation. The legerity and colorfulness is a mask, a “cover” story of dark somberness.

Zourabova’s paintings-stories examine life’s banal moments by magnifying them enormously. This act of blowing-up functions as an investigative gaze that reveals, as if through a magnifying glass, an absurd, grotesque and hyperbolic story in the spirit of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. At the same time it functions as a joke at the expense of art itself – what happens when nothing happens that merits artistic treatment and perpetuation. Each situation is an accidental and trivial fragment, a marginal moment of life. This distorted blow-up transforms a massive and severe rock into light, inflated balloon. The form itself remains indifferent to the artistic act. It falls down at will, and rises up at will. Sooner or later, we are bound to understand the situation, and admit it is only a painting. Perhaps “This is Not a Pipe,” but it is most certainly a statement about life.

For Natalia Zourabova, self irony and humor are a means for self preservation and a reaction to a pompous art that believes in its capability to shake and awaken the beholder to thinking and change. According to Zourabova, her generation is rather skeptical of art’s power to do so. Art is a place where one can defend oneself from reality, by hiding, as it were, within the thicket of the artistic jungle; living like a virtual image inside a “matrix.” Her paintings bring to mind – by design – the typical style of computer games. Three anti-heroes (Natalia, her husband and their daughter) “feature” in her paintings as virtual figures. Activated with remote control by an anonymous operator (the hand of fate? God?), they keep repeating their actions, falling and rising again, from “Start” to “Game Over,” and so on and so forth.

Zourabova’s stylistic paintings have an international air. They redolent of global aromas, such as computer aesthetics, online computer graphics, contemporary Japanese animation, and contemporary British[1] and German[2] art. Yet, Zourabova introduces into them quintessentially Israeli flavors and elements: her living room’s furniture; local playground plastic toys; local trash dumpsters (“frogs”); urban bus; anemone field at the edge of a grove, etc. It should be mentioned, however, that Beer Sheva’s cityscapes and the Negev Desert’s landscapes appearing in her paintings do not resemble any of their previous representations in Israeli art. They are devoid of either the familiar local orientalist, romantic, idealist, and patriotic imagery and symbols or of the abstract forms bathing in the intense blue light of the New Horizons Group. Nevertheless, as the artist herself has said,[3] “the signs in my paintings are local as well as universal, since they are integral to the postmodern world order”: Architecture, street signs, furniture, spatial planning, and so on can be found everywhere/nowhere nowadays.

Natalia Zourabova: “Art today is kind of a ‘science’ that only ‘scholars’ can understand. Contemporary art is multi-contextual and multi-layered. On the one hand, whoever considers it ‘externally’ cannot “really” penetrate into it. The work may seem simple, but actually it might be complex. On the other hand, who has time and patience to delve into all these contexts and layers? As you look at the bizarre thicket that constitutes the artistic jungle, you have to come to terms with your uncertainty, with the knowledge that you would never be able to identify the innumerable unidentified plants you see there.”[4]

One can discern in Zourabova’s painterly jungle traces, residues, remnants, and mutations of considerable number of artists, and art historical and visual culture trends and periods. Poured into her “food processor,” they all have became part and parcel of the new painterly product. Do we really need to know that a Mattissesque (Henri Matisse, 1869-1954) ornament appears on the carpet in the middle of the painted living room, or that a Hockney-like (David Hockney, b. 1937) coloration is concealed in the curtain? Will the beholder’s experience be different or richer due to her or his ability to decipher the plethora of citations and influences one can find in Zourabova’s paintings? A partial list would include references to works of Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Alex Katz (b. 1927), Gilbert and George (b. 1943 and 1942, respectively), Pierre et Gilles (b. 1950 and 1953, respectively), the Russian Avantgarde, or the illustrated books of legends Zourabova had read in her childhood. Is there still a place in her current world for naïve-fallacious stories about charming princes and fair princesses and happy ends? It seems that in a world of arbitrary events, in a reality of lawlessness, and in an existential thicket that cannot be undone at the end of the movie, almost nothing matters really. Still, by inertia, or thanks to painterly animation, mother-painter, father-mathematician and a little girl keep walking toward the sunset on the reddening horizon until a definite article and three letters will announce that everything is finished and done with. THE END, rather than HAPPY END, is the universal graphic sign. A neutral END, before the light is being turned off, a moment before everything topples down, implodes and sucked into a black hole, without anyone trying to decipher the dolphins’ last ever message to humanity: “So long and thanks for all the fish.”[5]