Triangle Gallery is pleased to announce Diary, the second personal exhibition of paintings by Olesya Rubeko (born 1997, lives and works in Saint-Petersburg).
Opening reception April 22 at 19:00. Through May 30, 2025.

The "Diary" by Olesya Rubeko is a peculiar collage of visualized impressions and feelings, inner states. Self-portraits and landscapes seem to be captured by a camera in motion and left in the gallery of memories as blurred photographs of living moments. The personal reflection is being guessed in the contours of objects in the external world that are shown as metaphorical spaces. The internal dialogue realizes itself through the sensory language.

"It's the dialogue with myself, the essence and the natural world, it's mystical, curious, tender and a little strange sometimes" - in this way Olesya Rubeko defines creative experience. She certainly reveals invariably close images through various media: "a female image (involuntarily) takes the central place in my works - as it seems to be the closest and most comprehensible subject for me as an artist. Fragile and at the same time strong, protagonists of my paintings are often depersonalized, their thoughts and feelings are expressed through the overall composition, the background, the palette of color and light...".

In the series of portraits we find a vital female image, plastically merged with nature and absorbed in the space of beautiful rosebuds, which turn out to be carnivorous plants. The contrasting portrait "Lullaby", where a girl immersed in her own world, is associated with childhood memories. The toy white horse in the foreground becomes a guide into the space of memory.

A girl looks into the "Mirror" (2024). Neither her face nor the reflection can be distinguished. She is turned away from us, turned to herself and the inner self. "The characters in my works create their personality through gaining knowledge and understanding from the outside." Big things are seen from a distance - the secret is hidden in small sprouts of flowers, that are hovering above the smooth surface of the table like a thought wandering in the subconscious of the hero in search of fertile soil. One finds the reflection in the mirror after turning around and looking back, physically living through a psychological experience. The sun's rays are reflected only in the vibrations of water - in the pearl shimmer of oil paint. Memories and newly experienced emotions open forgotten worlds, the image of an inner desire is refracted in the reflection of the mirror as a distant but familiar dream of white running horses. The feeling of inner freedom along with "gravitation towards chaos and simultaneous resistance to it" are bound with the space of the subconscious.
Searching for the elusive images in the mirror, that seem to be a myth creation, we look into the pieces of the soul. These fragments are trying to become whole and find themselves in the reflections of daily things - a small lamp in the bedroom or a dining table that suddenly appears on the sandy shore.

A pasty stroke of paint touches an ordinary object, blurs and turns it into a new chapter of the "Diary". This memory feeling has no obvious origin, yet it feels invariably familiar and intuitively clear.