| Remarkable technically and abundantly imaginative, Elena Sarni creates striking paintings filled with resonant images that comment on contemporary life and human nature. In her engrossing new show, entitled “Still Life Landscape,” which opens December 2 at the Grant Gallery, she uses the still life as a way to explore our unconscious. Sarni did not title her show casually. “The idea of the still life reflects and even explains the ideas and intuitions behind choice of objects,” she says, “and equally important, the juxtaposition of those objects. Depicted in a new space, they become memorials, emblems, and signatures. | 
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Remarkable technically and abundantly imaginative, Elena Sarni creates striking paintings filled with resonant images that comment on contemporary life and human nature. In her engrossing new show, entitled “Still Life Landscape,” which opens December 2 at the Grant Gallery, she uses the still life as a way to explore our unconscious.
Sarni did not title her show casually. “The idea of the still life reflects and even explains the ideas and intuitions behind choice of objects,” she says, “and equally important, the juxtaposition of those objects. Depicted in a new space, they become memorials, emblems, and signatures. ‘Still life,’ in most European languages translates as `dead nature.’ The things in my paintings are the dead objects of dead cultures. But these things acquire a new, specifically artistic life in the almost musical vibrations released by their proximity to one another, and are transformed in the process into objects of artistic significance.”
Sarni has moved through several distinct stages in her 20-year career. In the ‘80s, she composed collages with photographs of nudes, cutting them up to create cubist shapes. She later depicted Biblical characters such as Judith and Holofernes and Lot and His Daughters, painting voluptuous figures in vivid reds and blues. She also produced exuberantly sexual drawings like “The Kingdom of Flora,” which depicts lovers, half human and half floral, at play among rose petals.
Now, in the new exhibition, Sarni examines the intermingling of our past and present. “We’ve grown accustomed to the idea that new movements or schools or tendencies arise in the context of a binary opposition,” she says, “ seeing the new as a particular opposition to the old. It’s as if to say that in our culture and even in physical reality, certain objects never do and never can coexist in a single space. They are separated spatially, chronologically and especially conceptually. I do the opposite, reconciling precisely those things that are usually seen as inimically opposed. In these paintings, I alter the size of the objects and combine techniques from various artistic modes usually considered incompatible and various techniques – drawing and painting, for instance – gesturing towards distinct genres of visual expression and perception. While they occupy the same painterly space, they are given in various perspectives.”
In Sarni’s painting “Urn, Matisse and Bowl with Fruit,” which is 22” x 28,” she included pieces of Pompeian frescos, a Matisse drawing, a Roman sculpture of a bull, a Chinese vase and various more recognizable and less individualized objects, such as a waffle iron, a walkman and a Chinese spheres made in pairs to roll around in your hands. “I am working with the viewer’s consciousness here,” she says, “pulling the objects out of a particular everyday context and endowing them with `totality,’ giving them in their absolute `thingness.’ My emphasis is on freeing and dematerializing material.”
In is not surprising that the pretty, dark-haired Sarni, who still speaks with the accent of her native Russia, would combine disparate subjects and objects in her paintings, for she has lived in several different places in the world including Europe, the Middle East, New York and currently Los Angeles. Moreover, she grew up in L’vov, one of the most European cities in the former Soviet Union, leaving at 19. Though it is now in the Ukraine, her family, who moved there after the Second World War, belonged to an emphatically Russian minority. “Visually,” she says, “it was extremely central European, which influenced my interest in the visual and the history of art.”
Sarni’s father’s artistic talents probably influenced her more. She said that rather than tell her bedtime stories when she was a child, he would draw her pictures. “It was amazing but it became so natural to me that I don’t think I ever developed the idea,” she says, “which is really a barrier, that drawing and art are difficult and mysterious and that you can only do it if you spend an enormous amount of time studying. ”
In addition, the young Sarni delved into the family’s collection of sophisticated picture books, Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” and the six-volume “Life of the Animals,” as well as an album of paintings from the Dresden gallery. “Learning to depict,” she says, “ was for me what learning to write was for others – a natural and inevitable step in becoming part of the world.”
As Sarni developed, she grew to love El Greco, Bosch, Vermeer, Max Ernst, Cranach, Mondrian and many others artists. But for her, the shining example of the true artist is Durer. “I see in his works the sort of challenge he made to himself and the means he brought to bear upon the resolution. Durer was not engaged in a therapeutic exercise in self-expression; rather, he was translating through himself values and ideas integral to his culture and his world. The work does not express the artist, but rather itself. Durer is also the unmatched master of forms, something particularly evident in his engravings and drawings. For me, in spite of the 500- odd years dividing us, he remains the most avant-garde of artists.”
Art clearly consumes Sarni. “A work,” she says, “begins in my mind. The greater part of the artistic process is complete by the time the artwork commences its appearance in the outside world. I create physically only in daylight and often on the floor. Conceptually, it takes me from a few days to a year or two from the moment when the idea suddenly unfolds until it is a complete and ready to be created in the outside world. Then, it takes another two weeks or a month. Most of that is spent in the enthralling process of discovering what is necessary and what can be discarded, making the work tighter, more inevitable, more integral and more necessary. I work on my art—upon one thing or another—every day of my life. When I can’t work on it outwardly, I am working on it inwardly. I both day dream and night-dream new works.”
