Oksana Mas

 
  Oksana Mas’ paintings and sculptures reveal the intriguing game that memory plays with art- it can be a fascinating puzzle. Mas recurrently employs and manipulates a contemporary kaleidoscope of colors, visual media and art references to great lengths and to great effect. The artist immortalizes onto the canvas a myopic portrayal of informal stills echoing familiar photographs while disclosing private moments. The works take on the clinical cognitive paradigms of memory further, by reaching and superposing atypical dominions into a surreal emotional limbo, such as with Phenomenon, tires covered in what appears to be human extremities. The surreal sensory reaction shaped with its inborn sensibilities, developments and prejudgments, only enriches the dichotomy of her work. Beauty of the unknown can be unsettling.

Mas’ art, just like the cave paintings found at Lascaux and Altamira depicting humans acting their daily lives, helps us observe evidences of humanity’s fascination with itself; one that we, through our contemporary eyes and intellect, see as personal. The artist daringly delves into such subject matters with few qualms. Large-scale paintings, such as People and Pigeons, appear to flash past moments into an abstracted series of orderly human silhouettes evoking black and white celluloid stills. Her episodic cinematic trait conscientiously expands into close-ups in various vivid colors.
 
The diverse work Oksana Mas creates breeches art and design. Mas’ series of automobile engines, Heart Replacement, covered with luxurious leathers have a profound sensibility and an undeniable esthetic appeal. The tailored expertise applied onto the physicality of the “denatured object” form an elegant fetish-like visual appreciation that transcends genders and ages. The sculptures being preserved in sumptuous skins still announce their functional forms as icons of technology and mechanical design while being completely smothered out of their intended use. With Mas, form no longer follows function; form is appreciated for its newly expressed esthetic worth.  
 
 Stéphane Houy-Towner
 Art and Costume Historian
 
 Exhibition crated by Zorianna L. Altomaro and Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky