APPROPRIATIONNISME / TRANSPHOTOGRAPHY
BASED ON K. MEDVEDEVA'S WORK

“The Whole is More Than The Sum of Its Parts“   Taylor´s Interpretation

As a painter who also uses oils and, unusually, thick black tar mixed with white industrial house paint, Dominic Taylor could relate immediately to Katja Medvedeva´s lavish use of her fundamental materials - her thick, generous application of rich oil colours on canvas.

However the Swiss-British artist is known for his almost Chinese-like preference for muted “non-colours” such as beige, grays, off whites, cream, black, white and any number of tones of brown and orange. These can be seen most clearly in his recent tar painting series entitled EARTH TRIP which was created on the Spanish island of Ibiza and shown in the video here.

Only his photography explodes with colour, much like Medvedeva´s canvases which have been perhaps wrongly or prematurely limited to the “naïve” genre, whereby her “simplistic” or unrefined figures could easily fall into the abstract fields of drawing and painting, thus belonging to a more “sophisticated” art form.

The sophistication shared by the elderly Russian woman painter and this male Swiss painter-photographer is clear in their preoccupation with rendering the spiritual world tangible and making it somehow more concrete and comprehendible for us earthly spectators. 
In the art market hype and global boom, we have become accustomed to consuming decorative, shocking or otherwise familiar expressions of artistic “weltschmerz & angst”, but with these two artists from very contrasting worlds – Moscow and Geneva - we experience the universal spirit, unexpectedly channeled to us in their simple expressions of beauty.

Medvedeva and Taylor prove to us that artistic creation, its true success, lies in the ability to uplift the viewer through the spectacle of beautiful, colourful brush strokes, perfectly identified composition and the talented putting together of the parts to make a perfect whole. 

Being uplifted draws the human spirit into deeper, complex reflections; we are propelled by “good art” into the higher realms of philosophy and spirituality, while it reminds us that we are still caught up in the more banal, daily struggle to be “good human beings”.

Text:  Dr. Tania Peitzker,  EU public relations, Berlin/Oxford, 2008