Irina Kupyrova’s leisurely narratives take place on the borderline between the indoors and the outdoors, in the frame of the suggested window. The paint is lively and textured, but what shows through are the unexpectedly calm arrangements of figures and landscape, confident in their final appearance but hinting of a lengthy decision-making and many rejected options.
Women are always central to the work: never engaged, always contemplative, wearing their garments with casual neglect. They are confident but distant in their Modigliani-like stylization – the essence of feminine elegance synthesized into the painterly explorations of line and colour. There is an air of untroubled waiting about them that creates this particular state of stillness, allowing the artist to arrange the model’s long slim limbs according her aesthetic needs.
Irina’s experience of the colour is sensual, almost physical – her artificial, but observant settings pick on the differences in tone between artificial and natural light, indoors and outdoors, conveying with a couple of side-to-side colour juxtapositions a rich experience of the impressionistic space.