Galerija "Māksla XO"

European Cultural Lifestyles in Porcelain: from Baroque until Today - exhibition catalogue (concept - Riga Porcelain Museum). - Riga: the Association of Culture Institutions of Rīga Municipality, typography "Veiters", 2017. - p. 148.

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Elita Ansone. Perspective of the Solar System.- Riga: Latvian National Museum of Art, 2015.-
p. 56 - 57, 86 - 88.

The exhibition Perspective of the Solar System at the Arsenāls exhibition hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art seeks to show that people have always wanted to understand themselves in relation to the Universe. Artists have always created artworks inspired by the cosmology of various world religions, and are still inspired by the efforts of modern scientists to find the “God particle” in the subatomic world of bosons.

With a few exceptions, this exhibition features the work of Latvian authors – 163 artworks by 73 artists, as created between 1916 and 2014. This catalogue represents the various section of the exhibition: Dialectics of Space Exploration; Russian Cosmism; The Era of Space Exploration; The Cosmos in the Art of Zenta Logina; The Big Bang; The World as an Optical Illusion; Infinity; God; The Cybernetic Paintings of Sigurds Vīdzirkste; The Pythagorean Concept; the Eorld as Musical Harmony; Artūrs Riņķis’ Synaesthesia; Kinetic objects and Art in the Middle of Nowhere; Mandala; The Cosmology of Latvian Ornaments as Interpreted by Valdis Celms; Evolutionism; The Structures of Environmental Phenomena in the Art of Tatjana Krivenkova; molecular Aesthetics; The Line of Romanticism.
Elita Ansone, 2015.

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Tatjana Krivenkova: " The Light diverges from the Darkneness"

In front of me a blank page - purity, clarity, innocence incarnation - perfection. The need to write something perfectly balances with an arguments to leave a paper our canvas in a peace.

" We can not solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.", has said Albert Einstein. I hope that this citation justifys a use of a DIFFERENT THINKING.

Mathematican Ernest Carlson in his article " Happy Birthday, Daylight!" writes: In 1905 daylight saw the Special Theory of Relativity, where he (Albert Einstein) the same daylight succeesfully included back into a circle of relativity phenomenon , making its own space and time relative.

However, Andris Muiznieks, Associate Professor of University of Latvia ( Faculty of Physics and Mathematics), to the question - How The Theory of Relativity changed the world? - answered like this: " One of the conclusions is that two events, which takes place in two different locations of a room and which are synchronous in a one reference system can be able to not be synchronous in an other reference system, which moves with a speed in anent to the first one, consequently - " everything is relative" or it depends on observer. "

And again Einstein "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Tatjana Krivenkova, March 2011.
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Grafika-S. Latvian Contemporary Printmaking 2010-2014.
Exhibition catalogue (curator - Inga Steimane). - Riga: sociaty "Grafikas kamera", 2012. - 94.-97. lpp.
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Grafik aus Lettland. – Exhibition catalogue (Grafik Museum Stiftung Schreiner, Bad Steben, Germany). - Bad Steben: Grafik Museum Stiftung Schreiner, 2012. – 23.–28. lpp.
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Asums (Concept and editing Ilze Zeivate).- Riga: Maksla XO Gallery, 2008.- 58 p.

Looking for the point
Tatjana Krivenkova says the main thing is to find the real point. A point and infinity are one and the same. The Universe was also created from an "insignificant" ultra dense point that gave rise to the Big Bang. Krivenkova's paintings of recent years may be compared to an explosion where movement spreads out in all directions from a single point. Stars fall and stars are born, Northern Lights shimmer and diamonds glitter. We can't tell whether it is the apocalypse or the birth of a new world. They probably happen at the same time. That the painter was interested in the theory of cosmology was already evident in her exhibition "Solace" (2005) where the gloomy theory about information that, once having entered a black hole, can never escape, was overturned in a comforting way. The artist painted funnels, canals and openings in the flesh of the Universe - openings in an impasse. This concept coincided with the sensational announcement by the famous physicist Stephen Hawking[i] that information can in fact escape from black holes. If this theory is proved then it will resolve the paradox about black hole information. The painter also works in a paradoxical manner creating a collection with black holes and snowmen. A controversial method against itself is a good description of the psychology of the artist's creativity.

In her sensation of colour Tatjana Krivenkova introduces into her gentle, chalky pastel tone relationships a kind of shift away from the traditional arrangements of colour our eyes are used to. These finely tuned, somewhat shifted relationships create hidden reserves of a strange otherness, a desired wrongness and yet an infinite sensitivity. It is as if you find yourself in a different zone of time and space where everything is somehow different, apparently familiar but nevertheless changed. Space has been flattened yet time is limitless. The "Solace" exhibition was like a conclusion to a period of pastel tones and gentleness that lasted for almost ten years. This period was unobtrusive yet we were regularly reminded of the existence of a special and different talent by her exhibitions "Spirit of the rose"(1997), "The sea, the sea" (1998), "Large and small paintings" I and II (1999, 2000), "Post Factum" (2002), "Thanksgiving Day" and "The Draughtsman's Contract" (2003) and finally, "Solace" (2005).

Krivenkova has noticed that a person's intentions and actions can be very relative. You only have to call something by name, express it in the form of a claim or do it and soon enough, in life the complete opposite will happen. Perhaps it's an inner need not to let a discovery become a routine, the only truth and that is why the next step is taken seemingly in the opposite direction. After a period of painterly softness came a set of paintings with a new, opposite code that she called "Sharpness". Things also turned out differently in that being a good draughtswoman and still working on figural compositions as late as the mid-90s, for the last ten years Krivenkova has turned to abstraction. However, on this matter too, the painter has a different opinion. "I'm not an abstract painter, I'm a realist; everything I paint is completely real."

Taking into account that the series of paintings and exhibitions have concrete titles and that in recent years she has painted diamonds, stars, black holes, snowmen, the Northern Lights and a glass mountain, then there is no abstraction here. Formally it could be called abstract art. The ties of Krivenkova's to the classics and ideas of abstract art that were vibrating in the air over a century ago can even be described with great justification. The spiritual endeavours of abstract art have not diminished over a period of a century. Beginning around 1910-1920 the creative vitality at the birth of abstractionism marked a radically new page in the development of easel painting since the Renaissance. At the beginning of the 20th century, the sacred, spiritual message that had been previously been enclosed in realistic forms was now being expressed by artists in an abstract way.

In 1911 Wassily Kandinsky published his book "Concerning the spiritual in art" in which he wrote about the meaning of colours attributing to them meanings of infinity, light, purity and others. This need to ascribe to art (to a painting as an object) properties, which it could not own, makes abstractionism a fundamentally religious art because you need faith to believe that, for example, a black spot has the properties of a black hole.

It is tempting to connect Tatjana Krivenkova's latest works with both Italian Futurism and Rayonism[ii] founded by the leader of the Russian avant-garde movement Mikhail Larionov. The rayonists constructed their paintings with the help of rays of colour and light. Larionov chose pure primary colours - red, blue and yellow, and painted reflections of light on surfaces or sheaves of rays in the air. Krivenkova is also concerned with similar problems. She paints colours that come from the air. In this post-gentleness period she uses and contrasts primary colours. In the paintings it seems that fragments of glass are acting like prisms to generate rays of colour. However, the glass fragments have also had some quite distinctive relatives - diamonds, a girl's best friend, as the song goes. The artist is not being coquettish but with scientific observation, she endeavours to paint the complex form of a diamond whose crystalline lattice is formed by carbon atoms that give it outstanding light-splitting properties. Nothing can match the refraction coefficient of this structure. The transformed light creates colour. Attempts to depict this cannot compete with the geological structures involved in the genesis of diamonds. It is these unreachable depths that we find irresistible. It has to be admitted that science and technology in 20th and 21st centuries advances ahead of art; art can only follow. Already a century ago the futurists[iii] were exited about the speed of the new age brought about by modern machines - trains, cars, military equipment and they showed this speed in their works. These days artists are also integrating discoveries in cosmology, genetic engineering, medicine, deep earth exploration and other sciences in their works. This is often an intuitive process resulting from spiritual and irrational impulses.

Unlike the previous period that was meditatively philosophical and feminine, the last two years, reflected in the exhibitions "The lightness of being" (2006), "Stars" (2008) and now "Sharpness" (2008), is marked by much greater concreteness. Krivenkova's "gentleness", a relative term, was expressed tonally in unusual relationships of soft tones that were deliberately and finely regulated seemingly incorrectly by one tenth of a tone and yet infallibly grating. Previously there was more of the unsaid, difficult to articulate and to be perceived with one's feelings. And now, suddenly, like a denial of gentleness (what can you do with that?), the artist rips the canvas with an atypically aggressive gesture. There is the painting "Broken glass" in the spirit of Luciano Fontana's Spazialismo.[iv] Real movement comes into the work with a surprisingly expressive temperament. It seems that the artist has entered a different level of responsibility; in her works she has now begun to combine the philosophical with the actual.

The attempt to paint endless space, which has nothing to do with the flat surface of a painting, is something more than tones and forms for some decorative purposes. The artist's contribution to the expression of intellectual possibilities supplements our common spiritual field. Tatjana Krivenkova is actually a researcher of the structure of the world. Figuratively speaking we could say that about any artist but Krivenkova's object of interest is specifically the structure of the world - the one right next to us or the one unreachably distant.

"I wanted to paint in such a way that the viewer does not sense matter, so as not to sense the painting itself, so that there would be a window, an illusion."

Elita Ansone, 2009.

[i] Stephen Hawking (1942), Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, is one of the most outstanding physicists and contemporary thinkers since Albert Einstein.
[ii] Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964): Founder of Rayonism, one of the first abstract art movements, in Moscow around 1909. Having become familiar with the work of Turner in 1906, he became interested in the problems of light in painting. In 1913 Larionov published his Manifesto of Rayonism.
[iii] The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting was published in 1910 by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini.
[iv] Spazialismo or Spatialism, founded in 1946 by Luciano Fontana, was an avant-garde movement that attempted to introduce the dimension of real space into the painting.

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