info.olgasanina@gmail.com

@olgasanina

We all keep eternal memories of some landscapes we once visited. May they be a wild forest, a small garden shaped by a human hand or a lonely old tree, we remember their reassuring presence, their sense of existence, and what has resonated with/in us. Every year at every season, the color, the ambiance, and the light, change, and will never be exactly the same. There are ephemeral relics of these beloved places: the leaves. Every spring they appear, blossom, fall and disappear, carrying the soul of these places in their fragile veins. Picked one by one, collected in her notebooks, Olga methodically sorts and dries them in her herbariums. They become the reliquary of these beloved places : Olga's raw material.

After a few months of slow drying, Olga reopens the herbariums. The leaves are there, out of time, carrying the soul of their original home. Then comes a patient exercise of superimpositions, graphite, japan ink, gold leaf, paper glue, water, graphite again, japan ink, and so on. On her white sheet, the tree leaves appear in pencil, disappear under the ink, and are reborn under the water. The patient repetition of these gestures gives rise to her works. 

Unforgettable reflections of the places that gave birth to them. The time, as well as the light and its absence, the fragility of the materials Olga uses, the repetition and the clear act of the gesture without preconceived ideas, are essential elements permanently evoked in her work. Trying to link her art pieces to these different scales of time. Therefore, according to the journey she has done or the projects of her clients, Olga builds an archive of this raw material, keeping carefully these ephemeral memories in order to produce the Physical Memory of these places. Olga's artworks try to embody these instants into what she hopes remains a little bit more timeless.

text by François Brunner