The Dostoyevsky Heroines
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 visuals, we are
confronted with complex character studies of modern women. With references to art history, advertisement, fashion, film and literature, the sensuality of women, their radiance, strength and vulnerabilities are explored. In order to obtain and convey 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 unique characters and
dramatic stories.
In her earlier exhibitions, “A Vintage Collection” and “Modern Lovers”, sensuality, desire, religion and sexuality have been the central 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 terms. With her photographs, Rheims makes the observer realize that our eye, our desire, and our senses are all affected by cultural structures connected to sexuality. Edvarda does very much the same thing 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, whom he has yet to meet – but in this 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 an outlook that hasn’t been affected by the dominant 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”, as Edvarda calls them, which are displayed here. 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 reanimates five female characters from Dostoyevsky’s works by connecting them to Russian supermodels and Russian fashion. They carry with them a fragility, which is further emphasized by the surroundings and their poses. The decision to use Russian supermodels places the paintings in a national and cultural context, within the special history of Russia, which shaped Dostoyevsky’s characters and whom the Russian models are verities of.
These five paintings are a mix of iconography, and of Edvarda’s own interpretations of these women, having read and reread Dostoyevsky’s works over several decades. They have strong personalities, which explores and illuminates their positions in a society where guilt and shame, honor and class determined their fate.
The paintings are meant as movie posters, and these are Dostoyevsky’s superstars we are looking at. As in many movies from the golden age of Hollywood, these five women are the driving forces in Dostoyevsky’s novels, and “Edvarda’s Heroines” is a tribute to their struggles. The aesthetics Edvarda applies are highly reminiscent of posters and of the glossy surfaces of fashion magazines, and they provide a reflection wherein the observer can let himself or herself be seduced. The result becomes a neo-feminist equalizer of the hierarchies between traditional and popular culture, where fashion and beauty are conveyed through the complex characters of Dostoyevsky’s women.
In connecting fashion, glossy aesthetics, and Dostoyevsky’s female characters, Edvarda wishes to free the spectator from the conventional way of comparing oneself with – or reflecting oneself in – popular culture’s usual portrayal of the woman as an object. A connection to mass media as the defining mythmaker of our time is also an underlying motif. We live in an age where fantasy and reality are melting together, but as an audience we can
decide that the object of admiration is something we love to observe, while not feeling the urge to become it. The aesthetics are displayed as an offering, an undefined possibility 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 apparent in the women’s facial expressions and features. It is in the facial expressions that the inner lives of these characters are revealed, where the outside and the inside yields 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.
