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Russian ‘cultural patriots’ may resent the supranational approach of this piece insofar as it interferes with attempts to claim these artists ‘for their own’; while politically oriented western observers may resent it for devaluing the easy interpretation of the works as ‘products of socialist society’ or as political statements rather than as a continuation of the history of European art.

Yet how else can we explain such artists as Elena Sarni? She was born and raised in the Soviet Union, in Lvov, a city which occupied a position in the Ukraine analogous to that of St. Petersburg in Russia - the other city, not the political capital, but surely the cultural and artistic capital. Her education began there, but was completed abroad, where she established herself as an artist of unusual talent. Soon she moved to London. Having achieved success there, she moved again, this time to the United States. For nearly a decade, she has lived in New York City. The promotional materials for each of her many exhibitions, however, have categorized her as a Russian artist.
 
The last century will be remembered as the epoch of binary oppositions. They arose in all fields of human endeavor - physics (particles vs. waves, discrete vs. continuous, relativity vs. quantum), anthropology and psychology (the raw vs. the cooked, the conscious vs. the subconscious) and elsewhere. They dominate thought in the arts, as well: figurative vs. abstract, perspective vs. painting surface, tonic vs. atonic, narrative vs. non-narrative.

Sarni developed a series of distinct styles. As a whole, her work prophesies a reconciliation of the oppositions that define the cultural milieu in which she has lived. In early twentieth-century art - Art Nouveau, ‘decorative’ art (Klimt) and even architecture (from Gaudi to Schechtel) - she saw the potential of integrating perspectival depth and the planar approach to the painting surface central to radical modernist art. Her exploitation of the mythological and biblical subjects at the core of Western consciousness does more than merely ground her work in that culture. These images are so familiar - if not in the details of the stories to which they relate, then as subjects for artistic treatment - that they are perceived as precisely that: subjects for artistic treatment. The images are abstracted to the point where the narrative we already know too well, or the scene we have already seen, becomes unimportant; thus, they guide our attention to the essence of visual art - matters of line, color, plane and volume, of picture space and limiting frame. Sarni has reconciled mutually exclusive principles: figurative depiction sheds its ‘narrative’ character and assumes, in its place, the qualities of abstraction.

In the late 1980s, Sarni conceived of a series of works combining painting, photography and drawing; they were mostly executed during her London period. In one particularly intriguing work, smaller photographs are combined to create a subtly distorted version of Velasquez’s “Venus and Cupid.” The surface is treated to produce an oddly aged and painterly texture. The fusion of modern photographic technology with an impression of antiquity, of a subject from classical mythology with the work of a seventeenth-century master and a contemporary aesthetic conception of the female form – these are typical revelations of the synthetic power of Sarni’s art.

Her most recent series develops this concept in a novel manner. Mythological and biblical subjects are depicted, again through a contemporary aesthetic sensibility. Take, for example, the impressive depiction of “Judith with the Head of Holofernes,” a subject already treated by Cranach, Artemisia Gentileschi and others. It is an oil painting that almost seems an artistically altered photographic image, a precise reproduction purposefully made ‘less true to life.’ The intense color schemes go back to notions that preceded the now-universal approach to color, notions introduced by the Impressionists.
 
Sarni evokes depth by a technique at once traditional and revolutionary. To create three-dimensional contours, shading is produced by varying the intensity, rather than the temperature, of a form’s basic color. The effect works, as it does in a monochrome photograph; it can be found not only in photography, but also in fifteenth and sixteenth-century European art.
 
Simultaneously, Elena Sarni has continued her series Kingdom of Flora, exhibited at the Grant Gallery in April 2001. These are ink drawings of anthropomorphic figures combined with floral and botanical motifs, executed on rough white paper with embedded rose petals. Again, apparent figurativism shades into actual abstraction; the drawings reveal themselves as minimalist expression of an exquisite sense of line found in Empire and Art Nouveau. The compelling contours evince the artist’s firm control of the work; at the same time, the lines take into account the random, prior placement of the rose-petals. Thus, Sarni reconciles still further dichotomies within a single work - the natural and the man-made, the premeditated and the accidental.

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