The idea for the Summer Dress exhibition was born last July, when, while walking around the village of Pacha, I saw a giant plane tree. The tree was not just big, it was enormous. The grass at its roots was flattened, as if my unexpected appearance had scared off the casual lovers resting in its shade. I don’t know if there was an evergreen plane tree larger than the one I encountered in Crete, the place where Europa and Zeus made love, but this giant was so beautiful that it triggered the creation of a series of paintings that captivated me for a whole year.
Trying not to linger too long under the spreading crown of the tree, I went out to the river bank. The banks were overgrown with bizarre flowers so densely that the surface of the water was barely visible through their thickets. I could not recognize a single flower, a single plant, as if reborn, I looked at the world with new eyes and did not recognize in it the old one, familiar to me from childhood. New sensations overwhelmed me, and I felt how all the previous concepts, like dust, dispersed in the fresh wind of renewal. Emptiness and at the same time fullness, the saturation of another life, previously unfamiliar to me, completely absorbed me. Everything that had not been noticed before became important - the smallest detail, the weakest shade, intonation. Vision changed, or rather its selectivity. The plants surrounding me became a background, a large-scale decoration of a great mystery, an ornament of my summer dress. As if a mystery created by nature, in an instant destroyed all the castles in the air, woven from letters and words, all the rules and conventions of the modern world.
Text: Olga Tobreluts
