Ares - God of War Painting

When you begin speaking about a new art phenomena, it makes sense to start from what is known so that you can outline an artist's originality within some trend and terms and thus determine and evaluate the artist's true novelty and singularity. Which modern world art direction could Nina Valetova's painting be referred to, considering that her art stands out distinctly from the common local criteria? Perhaps it is surrealism? It is reasonable if thinking of it to a wide extent: surrealism is not entirely Dali's and Magritte's image-aimed technique which is mistakenly supposed to be the only standard of surrealism. Apart from that, one should not forget that surrealism was conceived not merely as a painting style but the way to achieve an altered and expanded state of consciousness and the way to alter the reality itself. Our artist is seemingly quite far from Freud-Marx' materialism of the former surrealism in general, but she accepts its alchemy-esoteric and psychedelic features regardless of her awareness. After all, in her works she does not obviously reconcile herself to a common everyday reality which is allegedly imposed to be the only one possible and that everyone perceives "˜as is' whereas she is eager to go beyond the empirical look in order to obtain a super reality. Nevertheless Nina Valetova's art requires more precise than surrealism definitions. There is more mystical and metaphysical attributes in her works than in the world view of surrealism which was seen as a collective art-psychology by its theorist A. Breton. At the same time he proclaimed "brilliant revenge of imagination as a true Philosopher's Stone" and this is meaningful to us. Perhaps what we need is a definition like "fantastic realism" or a more exact term "metaphysic realism" (this definition was invented by Daniil Andreyev and is now cultivated by such master of Russian esoteric literature as Y. Mamleyev). Besides, it is obvious that in our case it is not an unbridled emancipation of particularly private sub consciousness with its psychoses and complexes (which can be explained in Freud's words) and what is typical for ordinary surrealism, but it is the exit of Unconsciousness (in its high Jung's meaning) through the gates of imagination using archetypes towards something real and ontologically genuine which is in some way objective essences of a multilateral thin world.