PRESS:

Prerequisite to the evolution of Irina Alaverdova, a painter from Moscow, is her eager penetration in the divine secrets of art. Remember her early works which mainly displayed architectural motifs inspired by photographs and illustrations, familiar from books and eyewitnesses’ accounts, not first-hand impressions. They were images of those places where the artist had never been but where her imagination had always urged her to go. As that inner perception of the never-have-visited-but-familiar places was quite convincing, viewers were fascinated with her precise vision of the architecture, harmony of proportions, light and space. Her views of Paris and Moscow, for which the artist chose pastel, a quite difficult medium, were rather marked with a rare poetic spirituality of a true artist than with professional excellence that we find enchanting in the “magical music” of brushwork and coloured chalks.    
The bliss of free-flowing meditation did not last long for Irina Alaverdova. The euphoria of live impressions was replaced by the necessity of a deeper emotional and philosophic self-expression.
 
As a personality, easily carried away, gifted and impulsive, Irina Alaverdova was eager to find a proper way to realisation of her creative ambitions, so that to win attention and praise worthy of her talent. An endless generator of ideas, she found a purpose for her penetrating in the secrets of the Universe. That was desire to discover still new associations to present the viewer with the cosmic essence of life. Sound and word, music and poetry became new forms of spiritual transformation of her life experience. Now she seeks to see and convey the energy of sentiments and thoughts at another level of artistic perception of such philosophic phenomena as time and space. Enhancing symbolism of her language, Irina Alaverdova finds unique sources of inspiration, which enable the artist to play on the verge of seeming incompleteness of her works and affect the viewer’s imagination with their inimitable beauty.

Irina Alaverdova understands the trendy expression “artistic project” in her own way inviting viewers to perceive life and its eternal qualities through the harmony characteristic of music and poetry. Her “modules” – Symphony of the Sun, The Age of Aquarius and Bach’s Clavier in Birch Alleys – can be considered conceptual judging by the scope of their philosophic meaning. They are original by the originality of the artist’s painterly thinking, not their “textual” content.
   
Composition and colour, sense and vision of light and space become a unique means of writing in terms of painting the score of sentiments and thoughts, visual and acoustic associations. Irina Alaverdova very skilfully uses the classical rules of “numbers and compasses” like great Johann Sebastian Bach was virtuoso at turning “the basics of music theory” into music of fantastic power that demonstrated the puissance of his genius. 
   
Bach’ Clavier in Birch Alleys, the fruit of Irina Alaverdova’s creative imagination, presents a complicated system of transformation of a composition primarily meant for the organ into a visual one that uses the painterly language. Any attempt to interpret polyphony of fugues and cantatas in terms of colour imagery deserves a careful study and serious judgment. Without challenging the right of the artist to such a daring, only justified by the sincerity and inner necessity of the intention, we can just note citing Alaverdova herself that one should “listen with one’s eyes” and hear while seeing. More, her birch alleys undoubtedly bear an allegorical meaning.  The landscape motifs change their colour with the change of the season and, consequently, with different states of the landscape and light, as well as the angle of view and disposition of the artist. The artist’s imagination transforms the tree trunks and tree crowns receding inside the picture tending towards the eternity that hides behind the line of the horizon into a choral divertimento. Lines of birches shift with the perspective centre, like a star, twinkling in the boundless outer space popping up either in the centre, or off it, on the left side, or on the right one. The trees look like both the tubes of an organ with its own architectonics and registers and like a harbinger that indicates the pace of time. The modulations of her palette in the suite Bach’ Clavier in Birch Alleys testifies to the fact that Irina Alaverdova has an exceptionally good ear and exquisite taste. The artist is becoming more and more versatile, delicate and profound, a personality who has much to say in the future.
 
Alexander Rozhin
Member of the Russian
Academy of Arts