Edvarda’s women

By Andre Galì

For centuries, male painters have presented their version of female beauty and sensuality, how men see women and what women should look like. Edvarda Braanaas, a conscious woman in a time of growing feminism, uses the painting with all of its historical connotations as a medium to explore her own view on women’s aesthetics, how women are portrayed in paintings and how women portray themselves. In Edvarda’s glamorous paintings we are confronted with complex character studies of modern women. With references to art history, advertisement, fashion, film and literature, women’s sensuality, radiance, strength and vulnerability is explored. In order to obtain her interpretation Edvarda includes all aspects of today’s visual culture where women are portrayed as desirable objects. Through an artistic finish reminiscent of film posters, magazine covers and centrefolds, the paintings themselves become desirable, and always charged with queer characters and dramatic stories.

In her earlier exhibitions such as “A Vintage Collection” and “Modern Lovers”, sensuality, desire, religion and sexuality have been the leading motifs. In many ways, Edvarda is the post-modern painting’s answer to the French photographer Bettina Rheims. Rheims is among other things known for having taken back the power to define how women are portrayed in fashion-photography by photographing them on her own premises. With her photographs, Rheims makes the observer realize that our eye, our desire and our senses are all affected by cultural structures connected to sex. Edvarda does the same thing only with a brush and canvas and in this way she celebrates female beauty from another perspective than what has earlier been popular in art history and parts of modern visual culture.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, there is a scene where Prince Myshkin is shown a photograph of Nastasya Filippovna. He immediately falls in love with Nastasya, who he has yet to meet, but in that photograph he sees her whole destiny, her beauty, vulnerability and suffering. Due to his illness, Myshkin has been excluded from the real world for a long time, but this has given him the ability to approach the world in a very naïve way. Because he is a stranger to Russian codes, both cultural and social, he has a look which hasn’t been affected by the dominating power-structures, and he can see people the way they really are, without judgement. When he is presented with the photograph of Nastasya he immediately understands her whole character, and it is this character which gives her beauty depth and sincerity, and which is the reason for him falling in love with her.

The scene where Prince Myshkin sees the picture of Nastasya can be compared with how we, the viewers, can meet Edvarda’s paintings. The comparison is obviously not coincidentally chosen since it is indeed Dostoyevsky’s women, or “heroines” which Edvarda calls them, that are shown. Her goal has been to help us discover the depth and complexity which makes them almost unearthly beautiful. If we can meet her paintings the way Prince Myshkin meets the photograph of Nastasya we can also get an insight into the personalities that these women are.

With the exhibition “Dostoyevsky’s Heroines”, Edvarda revitalizes five female characters from Dostoyevsky’s works by connecting them to Russian supermodels and Russian fashion. They carry with them a fragility which is strengthened by the surroundings and the poses. The choice of using Russian supermodels was to place the paintings in a national and cultural context, the special history which Russia carry and which has shaped Dostoyevsky’s characters and whom the Russian models are verities of.

The five paintings are a mix of icons and of Edvarda’s own interpretations of the women as a result of having read Dostoyevsky’s works over several decades. They have strong personalities which explore the positions in a society where guilt and shame, honour and class determines their fate.

The paintings are meant as movie posters and it is Dostoyevsky’s superstars we are looking at. As in many movies from the golden age of Hollywood, the five women are the force in the books and “Edvarda’s Heroines” is a tribute to their struggles. The aesthetics Edvarda applies are highly reminiscent of the posters and the fashion magazine’s glossy surface, and they provide a reflection-area where the observer can let oneself be seduced. The result becomes a new-feministic equalization of hierarchies between traditional and popular culture where fashion and beauty are conveyed through the complex characters whom Dostoyevsky’s women possess.

Through connecting fashion, glossy aesthetics and Dostoyevsky’s female characters, Edvarda wish to free the spectator from the usual way of comparing oneself with - or reflect oneself in - the pop-cultural way of portraying the woman as an object. A connection to mass media as the mythology of modern time is also an underlying motif. We live in a time where fantasy and reality are melted together, but as an audience we can choose the object of admiration as something we love to observe, but still doesn’t feel the urge to become. The aesthetics are lying there as an offer, a possibility that is undefined and which we can borrow a piece of to either construct or reconstruct our own identities.

Surface and inner character are therefore no oppositions in Edvarda’s art, which becomes clear in the women’s facial expressions and features. It is in the facial expressions that the characters inner life is revealed, where the outside and the inside result in the face of a true heroine. As in the photography of Nastasya Filippovna, the painting’s surface contains the whole of the woman’s character; all you have to do is look closely enough, and without judgement.

Translated by Meriam Braanaas