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I am a multidisciplinary artist and I'm crazy about portraits.

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The portraits of Maria Zaikina

It’s an interesting time for the art of portraiture in the era of the abundance of photographic portraits and selfies.

The portraits of Maria Zaikina are drawn after images found on the internet, on social networks, seen on news channels or in historical articles, and after personal photographs. Either way. It is of great interest to observe the organic line of the artist, tracking, flirting and negating the original line of the technological simulacra.

Humor enters into play, hyperbole and exaggeration as well. Especially so in the self-portraiture of Maria Zaikina. It is no great wonder therefore why she was invited to exhibit her works,

in The New Wing Gogol House in Moscow, him, being the chief caricaturist and typologist,

of Russian life and its human types at full play.

Zaikina’s critique is ever so subtle, you hardly feel the distance taken from the original image. Its one stain, one faint color that makes all the difference, and sends you once more to the contemplation, of what is mimetic art in this day and age, while lie the advantage, the humanistic strains, that the hand-line has over its technological origin. What is Origin at all, if it is technology, a sequence of decoded numbers amounting finally to an obscure image, obscure to the machine projecting it before our eyes?

It is interesting to watch the wall of Maria’s drawings and paintings in Natalia Zurabova’s studio. The bigger the frame is the more it is divorced from reality and tends towards the abstract,

or unreal. So at once, we see her trying to be faithful to the original mugshot, while at the same time flirting with the possibility of character when the space affords it.

Of further interest, are the drawings of mugshots taken from prisoners. One can hardly think of a function more bureaucratic and suppressive, in the making of a portrait, the tracing of a face. When copying over these mugshots, in some way uncanny almost. The copy of the copy allows the faces a way back to their soul origin. A way back to self, past the subordination to the machinations of society, and its engineered mas order of control. Zaikina introduces them with their inherent freedom as human beings, similar to ourselves, the viewers, standing

in the right side of oppression, or are we?

Interesting also, are the manipulation of colors, the yellows that take over some of the backgrounds, expressionist waterfalls of color breaking away from the mimetic mode, and expressing more of the artists attitude to art, than the face or figure of the character portrayed.

These are interesting experiments that amount to a gentle, and at times humoristic view of the possibility of mimesis via digital imagery, but a the same time as an intriguing question about what is to come of the art of the drawn or painted portrait.

Orian Morris,

writer, literature critic

FB page: www.facebook.com/maria.zaikina

Behance: www.behance.net/MariaZaikina

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Some prints are also available on Redbubble.com www.redbubble.com/people/suzymaria