There is a real sense of joy and buoyancy in the works of Moldovan artist Ksenia Dermenzhi. Despite the unbridled energy emanating from these paintings, the London-based artist displays a mastery over her technique that belies her youth. Seeming to borrow from the free-form approach of the Blau Reiter period, her paintings similarly utilize a broad language of abstraction, including traditions known by Surrealist and Cubist artists. Or perhaps a 20th Century formalism is at work: allusions to artists like Cy Twombly, de Koonig, or Lee Krasner, where frenetic energy suggests a sense of form, or psychological states.
Her dynamic and frontal compositions are built up over time through colour-washes and painterly spills, intentional marks as well as organic expressions of paint. True abstraction is a difficult technique to ‘get right’: Picasso himself was well documented as saying it took a lifetime to paint ‘like a child’, and Dermenzhi’s large-scale floral and abstract paintings seem to house that chaotic, childlike energy. Perhaps most astute is her similarity to the great Kandinsky, whose paintings were a direct response to music, and likewise, Dermenzhi’s works show a masterful control of freedom, spontaneity, and considered mark-making. The works are simultaneously based around real and imagined floral arrangements, always harkening to some sense of realism, but allowing for a sense of play, joy, and fantasy.
