"Commersant" St. Petersburg, №219P, 01.12.2003

Bride abduction in the quilt technique
St. Petersburg Literature and Graphics Centre in Liteyny Prospect hosts an exhibition of works of Izabella Baikova, winner of Grand-Prix of All-Russian competition of patch-work sewing, working in the technique having the peculiar name "quilt".
     The notion "quilt" here comes from the term "patch-work quilt" - called so in common language, but in fact representing a truly complicated technique of making collages on the basis of textile patches, including embroidery, applique work and batic method. It became a phenomenon of fashion from 1987, when an American Clive Jones made the first quilt in memory of his friend who died of AIDS. From that time quilt became an international symbol of anti-AIDS movement. Izabella Baikova, though, works beyond any ideology. At the same time her works do not represent merely "applied arts and crafts". They are full-value paintings having - in virtue of the technique used - masterly artistic sophistication and fragility, balancing on the verge of sentimentality, but never transgressing it.
     Her urban views is the collection of pictured atmospheric conditions, a funny chronicle of their influence on the citizens' mood. The peculiar name is "100% Air Humidity". The quilt lets the artist convey the nuances of air, the effect of snow, street illumination, the seducing play of female shadows by the windows. Baikova's fairy-tale-series works, "Slavonic Carpet" or doll compositions show her experience of creation of her own mythology. The frequent and favourite occupation of her characters is bride abduction in all possible ways, including by mammoths.
     If the urban views and fairy-tale subjects depicted by Ms. Baikova conform on the whole to what the public is accustomed to expect of applied art artists, this is not typical of the works devoted, roughly speaking, to a modern woman. There are subjects that would seem unfit for "high art" by default, moreover, for the art supposed to "refine the daily life", as supposed by popular views. Genre-specific, everyday-life flicker and scattering normally prove to be unfit. But there are artists who are able to find beauty, even if flavoured with irony, in most prosaic things, typical customary gestures. For instance, Ekaterina Nesterova, an artist and a passionate motorist executed the tapestries "My "Volga" and "Repairs of Carburettor" exhibited in Moscow in late 1980-ies. As to Izabella Baikova, in her compositions with a neutral name "Spring" and "At the mirror" she follows the way of Edgar Degas who was the first to show the modern women of his time engaged in purely female occupations, always concealed from strange eye. Ms. Baikova's heroines, happy with spring coming, "preen their feathers": make pedicure, apply scary green masks on the face. A beautiful woman adjusts her shock of hair in front of the mirror in a hasty, a bit alarmed, gesture. The same thoroughness is shown by the painter in her materializing the air of Petersburg - when she embroiders a fuming cigarette on the edge of a sink and a rusty tap. The adherents of lifesimilarity in art would be much surprised to find that the attendants of the Literature and Graphics Centre faultlessly identified the woman at the exhibition who became a model for the "Mirror", though the painter left only the huge eyes out of all facial features.

     MIKHAIL TROFIMENKOV