Ocean & San Carlos |
Ilya Zomb’s theatrical, enchanting paintings describe a world that revolves around artistry and grace, a place populated by a troupe of voluptuous ballerinas who pirouette their way across the landscape with wild beasts as their willing collaborators. Here, the inhabitants are blessed with a gift of balance that is all but otherworldly--Zomb’s dancers maintain their perfect poise even as they twirl atop tightropes, flit through bodies of water, or stand on the backs of wading elephants.
Ilya Zomb’s paintings themselves toe the line between the real and unreal as a great dancer might: It’s impossible to tell whether these images depict a separate reality or whether we are witnessing a kind of play, a lavish performance on the scale of those staged for renaissance-era royalty. Indeed, the Mediterranean-like landscapes, rendered in intricate, feathery detail and in colors reminiscent of age-old frescoes, recall the works of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian masters.
Like Edgar Degas before him, Ilya Zomb is enthralled by the forms of dancers, fascinated by their ability to simultaneously transcend and manipulate their own bodies; to defy the limitations of their environments even as they wholly engage them. Works such as Equilibrium of Relaxation, which depicts a contemplative ballerina at rest, demonstrate the reverence Zomb has for a dancer’s psyche—the passion for beauty, for strength, for precision. To look at one of his paintings is to inhabit for a moment the mind of a ballerina ourselves. We feel as if we, too, are temporarily suspended from reality, as if we’re poised on the threshold of a dream.
Ocean & San Carlos |
