In summer 2008 Maria Semenskaya started a series of paintings that caught the attention of the public for several reasons.

The whole series displays a great terseness of forms and, more generally, of the visual parameters of each piece that reproduce the same pattern: the movement of an illusory and yet very real, almost photographic girl’s body in an ornamental and conventional environment. But this concision is part of the artist’s goal which is to create and open-ended visual sequence evolving like a musical piece. Its elements and its ornamental and dynamical structure build such a solid and convincing framework that the whole image gains its own plastic, chromatic and rhythmic life.

This life is probably nothing but an illusion, but the theme of illusion-making is a kind of anamnesis of the previous states of art, of the challenges that the art had to meet in the past and that it considers today as its own history, fully conscious of the fact that theses challenges are not in the area of responsibility of the contemporary art.

Maria Semenskaya’s works in a very “postdesign” manner. As a former student of the  Mukhina School of Art in Saint-Petersburg, Semenskaya feels comfortable with combining elements of different styles: the orientalist ornamentality charged with sacral simbolism grows into the sixties psychedelic exaltation, which in turn dissolves in the easily recognizable graphic clichés of the modern designer brands. Is it an illusion of freedom or is it the pursuit of freedom or modernism (Art Nouveau)? Its whimsical timidity is supplanted by mathematically structured and symmetrically spreading Art Déco ornaments, and in the end all these aesthetical agenda merge into one stylistic patchwork. They lose their ideological autonomy, aggressiveness and vital energy and start existing as a mere background for a very straightforward cartoon, film or game providing some sort of security to this infantile eternity dreamt by the popular culture.

The pictures are multilayered and minimalist at the same time. <…> Just like the events of a day assemble into a day, the days into a week and so on, so do the fragments of this project that constellate into short logical stories, and later into series. The words “series” and espacially “story” might not be quite accurate though, since this pictures are free of any kind narration. They are like a living organism, they have this strong vegetal dimension caught in the stream of movement and gradually turning into a human dimension. This movement comprises emotional gestures, eurythmics, danses, in other words the expressive, significant moves of the human body, its openess and its embedment in the openness of the everlasting stream of life.