Yevgeniya Baras:
The Baras has
two sides
Yevgeniya Baras makes paintings that speak their own language about process and materiality.
The strictures of social isolation have undoubtedly elevated the practice of looking at art at a remove. In our splendid solitude, so many of us have become connoisseurs of the digital realm, astute at navigating social media with a prowess formerly reserved only for the generation who created it. The art world, a late adopter of Instagram and the like, has found its spiritual home, as it were. For a visually-based medium, it is astonishing that it took so long for art galleries, dealers and artists to get on board. The genie is of course out of the bottle now, and platforms such as Instagram have arguably been the saviour of the arts in this time of lockdown. It is often said that much is lost in the virtual world – the physicality of the work, the ‘in the flesh’ visceral quality of the experience, the transferral of aura. All of these things are true, but they are not the only story an artwork tells. I thought of this when I was looking at the work of New York-based artist Yevgeniya Baras. She makes paintings that are really so much more than that which is implied by that particular medium. Baras often combines hard and soft elements, two- and three-dimensional elements, hessian, paint, glue, collage, to arrive at something that is quite unlike anything I have ever seen. It’s not pure painting, nor is it sculpture. It’s a marvellous hybrid..Subscribe to read this article in full
