Svetlana Malakhoff and her models
by Alexandra Shatskikh,
Doctor of Art History; Member of AICA-USA, International
Association of Art Critics — UNESCO-affiliated
The women in Svetlana Malakhova’s paintings strike with immediacy and force. At first encounter, it is difficult to understand what prevails — acceptance or resistance — yet one thing becomes certain: having seen these anti-glamorous heroines, one cannot forget them.
Her figures possess another remarkable trait, intimately linked to the first. Malakhova’s massive, tangible, utterly contemporary women carry a sense of noble ancestry; they seem to descend directly from the ancient Venuses of the Paleolithic, whose monumental, hyperbolic forms embodied the earliest archetype of fertility and power.
By comparison, the corpulent beauties of Peter Paul Rubens, or Rembrandt’s beloveds, their bodies heavy with folds and shadows, appear almost youthful — mere centuries old beside their prehistoric foremothers. Malakhova’s plump heroines also find their sisters in modernity: the exuberant merchant wives of Boris Kustodiev, the mature nudes of Lucian Freud, and the monumental citizens of Fernando Botero.
Malakhova paints her weighty heroines with merciless, unsparing love and enviable mastery — and in the end, one experiences a strange catharsis: how beautiful these unbeautiful women are.