套娃

The matryoshka is little more than a hundred years old: the first was turned and painted in the late nineteenth century in a workshop near Moscow, and almost at once it became a sign of the country — before it had time to become a toy. Its form and its idea are the simplest possible: inside one, another. Everything that later stuck to it as a souvenir is paint, not form.

The series strips the souvenir away. Three things remain — silhouette, face and pattern — and they are laid down the way an icon is laid down. A face on gold. A red one with flowers, the painting following the relief. A dark silhouette with a golden slit — a matryoshka of which only the contour is left. A blue one with a cluster of small ones inside. A doll that holds another doll becomes an image that holds another image.

Relief on artboard, paint, leaf gold on the face and the ground, epoxy resin. The pattern is laid by hand, as on wood, but at the scale of a wall; the gold is muted so that the face reads instead of glaring. The edition is numbered.

The most domestic series in the studio: a living room, a nursery, a kitchen, a café. The matryoshka needs no explanation in any language, which is why it leaves Russia more often than any other work.