VLADEY presents a solo exhibition «Solar wind» by Maria Safronova within the framework of the «Artist of the Week» program.  

The exhibition presents a series of paintings, that depict the life and working process of cosmonauts, carrying a watch at the orbital station. In a situation when the top does not differ from the bottom, day from night and people lose their personality in identical spacesuits, usual actions and communication become different. In outer space a person learns how to live fresh again. And only the working functions and tasks of the cosmonaut give him a sense of reality, the flow of time.

Maria Safronova: «A person faces the unknown in outer space, where the boundaries are conditional and the actions take on new, unusual values. The stay of people in space is as a birth in a new space, where a man is always a baby, the same and unrecognizable in his spacesuit, but with a sense of certainty and the ability to fulfill his duties.

This series has no top and no bottom, there is no first and last number, time and duration of the action — all the reference points slip. Therefore, for the pictures I chose the shapes of a circle and a square: they do not have a spatial binding, they can be rotated, which corresponds to the state of weightlessness.

It is hard to estimate unknown processes, that are devoid of social definiteness and familiar estimates - its meaning remains hidden. The viewer can only observe an unusual situation in which ordinary gestures and meanings cease to work, where everything is anonymous and devoid of clear recognizability. In our everyday life, the lack of personalization, live communication and unconsciousness of the actions performed are not so obvious».