Exhibition by Ekaterina Belyavskaya "Checkmate and You" Automatic translate

The new project of Ekaterina Belyavskaya “Chess, Mat and You”, and when adding words as syllables - “Chess”, includes 15 paintings, the artistic language, as before, is distinguished by a bright palette, fantasticness, and theatricality. Intellectual, strictly logical “game of the mind”, chess at all times was accompanied by a passion of passion, excitement, intrigue, prohibitions, however, they marched triumphantly through time and space. They conquered chess and the spaces of art, literature, poetry. Belyavskaya on chess: “Black, but white, an overly popular game, but the game is elitist, clear logic and calculation, and at the same time passion and surprise…, we can talk endlessly about contrasts in chess, they consist of a huge number of contradictions and that’s why they are attractive for the artist. If I had only one phrase to describe the essence of chess, then I would say - This is the favorite game of the Venetian courtesans and Indian ascetics. ”

Katya Belyavskaya plays a chess game on her canvases, the chess player will see, perhaps, the solutions to her chess problems (for example, Endgame). Her pieces are not just alive, they rush in a frantic dance (for example, “The death of the white horse”, “Black”), pawns-ballerinas warm up at the machine (“Royal pawns are black”), they are tense and trembling “Before the game - Before battle ”, ready to enter the scene from 64 cells. Nabokov: “The movements of rhymes and winged dancers / are in the chess problem.” Vladimir Nabokov, a skilled chess player, saw in chess both the dance and the severity of poetic size, the flight of rhymes and the wings of the dancers.

Shah and Mat - The King is dead, but You are! Katya Belyavskaya considers a chess game between a man and a woman as a kind of wedding dance. Passionate as a tango, and perfect as a ballet. V. Nabokov: “touching either the pawns or the rooks / I came up with the task until dawn. / And he enclosed in the pattern of her answer / all our night, all your exclamations, / and the shadow of the branches, and the bright jets of flowing stars… ". E. Belyavskaya: “For all its logic, chess has always been very sexy, like many games of the mind are sexy. When a man and a woman sit down at the board, the game immediately ceases to be just a game, it turns into a dance that is not inferior in passion to real tango. That’s why I decided that the chess game would make a wonderful ballet and drew a “ballet in pictures”, because if there is a “romance in verses”, then there should be a ballet in pictures. ”

These comparisons are not random. It is striking how the poet and writer Vladimir Nabokov and the artist Ekaterina Belyavskaya are related in their relations with chess. The author of this essay knows for certain that Katya Belyavskaya, when starting her project, never read Three Chess Sonnets, and the similarity of interpretations with a time interval of almost 100 years is undoubted! Brain researcher Natalia Bekhtereva suggests that thoughts are not born in the human brain, but are in the air, and the brain only picks up these thoughts as a locator. Two creative people at different times caught similar thoughts and created their own works. Is this not a confirmation of the hypothesis of N. Bekhtereva.

The viewer will be surprised to see in the artist’s compositions milk packages built in Gothic castles, milk bottles and cans of condensed milk, sweets - Red October, Soya bars and others among the props. However, having thought, a clever viewer in these attributes of the Soviet past will see a tactful reminder of the artist about the great Soviet chess school. Meanwhile, "the fairy rhyme - on the chessboard / is, gleaming in the varnish, / and - light - takes off on the toe."