A spokesman said: “Looking at her creations the viewer is immediately taken by the colours, shapes and complexity of her pictorial surfaces. These paintings have the visual vitality of live images, whole and fragmented, of a movie about contemporary modern life while having the virtue of solid construction. You will see geometrical shapes ranging from mysterious sun dials to old and recent architecture and images of people sometimes solid and monumental, sometimes ghostly and transparent, passing through life’s surface like deeper memories pulled from the back of the mind. “Influences on Irina come from various sources, particularly early 20th century art, Wassily Kandinsky, the father of abstraction, and of course Picasso and Braque, masters of composition and structure, and, nearer to our time, Robert Rauschenberg who combined often disparate surfaces, photography and printing, and then, notably, Willem de Kooning who made abstract art out of the closely observed human form. What fascinated Irina about him, long before she embarked on this series, was what he once said about a car journey: when driven in a passenger seat in a high speed car, watching out of the window, he saw a melange of buildings, human figures, advertising boards, trees and objects all melting into a single abstract image which his eyes could not place yet to which the brain, feelings and memory gave clear coherence. “To prepare for this series Irina took many photographs, mostly in Eastbourne, where reflections in large shop windows reveal images of people passing by, of ambulances, objects for sale, books, children – the very street life of the town. But to accommodate a larger scale she took photographs of impressive buildings in London and anything curious about human life which caught her eye. “Selected images go through transformation on the computer giving them the desired colour and texture. Then the process of creating starts when the composition and structure are given priority. Irina uses best quality acrylic paint and special techniques to bring out the desired textures. Her challenge is to combine fluid and solid forms in a layered medley which holds together as a finished pictorial surface. Geometrical structure here plays a vital role in integrating the picture’s unity. She is constantly alert to colour combinations, so that one particular picture has its own aura, and the colours belong uniquely to this picture and never could be taken out and replaced. Irina’s method of combining painted and photographed elements allow her the freedom to interpret her chosen elements or with a brush mark, sharp lines or transparent veils to achieve a coherent and controlled result. This is why, rather than spell things out, she strives to create a productive dialogue between viewer and image.”
