The Magic Mirror

Anna Brochet is in life an extraordinarily charming and attractive woman, but as an artist she stoically continues to battle with the glamorous standards of female seductiveness which are thrust from the outside upon the better half of humanity. Every unifying canon is impersonal - even when it deals with the face - totally codifying the "correct" form of eyebrows or lips, determining which makeup is fashionable, and specifying the single correct hair length. On the impersonality of fashion matrixes - obligatory for all clientele of beauty salons and readers of glossy magazines - there is nothing to do but answer with an especially personal, expressive artistic gesture, the maestria of "pure art". And Anna Brochet acts in this way, paradoxically combining in her aesthetics topical anti-consumer themes, the social pathos of female independence, technical innovations and a conservative belief in the free stroke of the painter's brush.

In her last project - Should One Believe in Beauty - the artist tastily transformed perfume and cosmetic advertising photo images, turning them into macabre, dripping paints of carnal colors, physiologicalized pictures where the celebration of the painting has already transmuted into a drunken orgy in which all norms and laws are cancelled. In this way, liberated art has overcome the imaginary temptations of the disciplining and restraining advertising, which is continuously sending all of its charming victims to the world slave market of beauty. It is curious that in her project, Brochet has included not only canvases that are travesties echoing photos from outdoor billboards and the pages of magazines, but also photos of her own works - as if remaining on enemy "reproductive" territory, and thereby carrying out her artistic acts of terrorism in guerilla fashion. At her new exhibition - also in the "VP-Studio" Gallery of Vera Pogodina - Anna Brochet again combines technological experimentation with picturesque tradition, painting on mirrors and plexiglas. And from the viewpoint of art history - just as with photographs - such an unusual medium is marked as an attribute of the enemy - all coming from the same world of fashion and glamour.

For Brochet, the mirror is the principal female assistant in overcoming individual "self" for the sake of refinement in the very enticing world of "high society." Young women of fashion look into smooth and shiny rectangles not to glimpse into themselves, but to correct their makeup and to make sure that they will pass social "face control." The mirror in today's mass culture of restaurants, night clubs and private parties has lost the metaphysical magicality and ambiguity which inspired the old masters, philosophers and semiotics, and it has become a mere functional, one-dimensional object affirming the bourgeois standard of obsessiveness. And it is exactly on a mirror or transparent glass that Brochet paints her erotic, free and casual, yet plastically expressive etudes and improvisations - as if trying to find her way to the lost World behind the looking glass, trying with the sincere lyrics of her "maiden" painting to awaken womankind from the deception of glamour. In mirrors, Brochet reflects the struggle between what is private, secret and intimate and what is public and created for the greedy eyes of others - both personalized Desire and abstract Temptation. And timid fluttering shadows behind transparent pictures suggest the possibility of a mystical victory.