Painting Games and Paper Boats: 

Sailing Away With Zoya Frolova

    Boat after boat, sailing on a seemingly limitless sea, sometimes storm-tossed, sometimes more serene, but never still, always ecstatically churning, surface and depth forming one seamless current of self-excited power is the first thing you notice in Zoya’s work.  Zoya Frolova’s boats are ironically fragile – paper constructions that nonetheless survive, never coming apart for all the pounding of the waves, steadily sailing on wherever the journey may lead (if it leads anywhere) – and luminous, their radiant whiteness conveying transcendence of the richly colored, often dark waters on which they sail. 

The overall paintings are dramatically beautiful in a romantic way, for the space evokes infinity – it seems immeasurable, although the paper boat has clearly taken its measure (otherwise it would be unable to steer itself through the sea, hold its own despite the constant threat of being engulfed) – while the boat conveys the struggle of humanity to make its difficult, vulnerable way in the indifferent universe.

    But there is more to Frolova’s allegorical scenes than their all too human meaning – for the boat is implicitly the human figure, indeed Frolova herself (“I am myself a paper boat,” she writes, “my fate is in the hands of the elements”):  they are also allegories of painting itself.  Indeed, they engage the extremes of painting:  on the one hand, they are picturesque panoramic seascapes, with the embattled boat a sort of heroic figure struggling to survive in an inhospitable environment in which the odds seem stacked against it (social history painting was once a major genre; personal history painting has replaced it in modernity); on the other hand, they are majestic painterly abstractions, with the fluid, all-over surface serving as the ground on which the figure enacts its fate (however unstable – dubious, unsupportive, dangerous – a ground it is).  Frolova is at once a process painter – a painter caught up in the chancy, uncertain process of gestural painting (every gesture a new risk, emotional as well as formal) – and a sublime illusionist, picturing the vicissitudes of existence. One may say the perils of painting and the perils of Frolova converge.

    For Frolova, “painting is the single most enrapturing, intriguing and abstract of human games,” and in contemporary painting the game can only be won – and Frolova is a winner – by integrating representation and abstraction as though they had never been bifurcated. 
Frolova re-unites what Kandinsky separated:  where he viewed a Monet Haystack as a colorful pentagon—a subjectively exciting abstract painting – rather than a representation of an object, Frovola’s seascapes reveal the ocean to be the model for all-over abstract painting, endlessly painting and repainting itself—expressively charging and recharging itself – while retaining its objective identity as a natural phenomenon.  In other words, for Frolova what Kandinsky called inner necessity – the painting’s emotional kernel – is inseparable from what he dismissed as its superficial representational shell.  Restoring the balance between abstraction and representation –demonstrating their inextricability – Frolova renews the integrity of painting.

    With exquisite cunning, Frovola shows her boat-figure precariously afloat on the slippery painterly surface, formally at one with its flatness while conceptually distinct.  The boat, made of paper, can easily unfold, or else can become water-logged and sink – wet paper will eventually disintegrate – but it keeps on sailing, as though indestructible, even invincible.  Its movement at once registers and The boat is a ghostly illusion informed by the sea's real power.resists the ocean’s movement, suggesting the dialectical subtlety of their relationship.  The boat is a ghostly illusion informed by the sea’s real power.  Their inner reciprocity is self-evident in In the Shadows, 2004 and Joyful Water, 2005: Frolova projects her moods into the mysterious sea, which amplifies them in a distorting mirror (sometimes her sea seems to broodon the silent depths, like Rodin’s Thinker, at other times it seems like a witch’s brew, full of mischief and treachery).  It is a romantic anthropomorphization of the ocean, familiar from Turner and Friedrich – and Pollock and Rothko.  The elemental magnificence of the ocean has been an ambiguous source of inspiration for romantic painters since Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. Frolova’s paintings have a secure place in the romantic tradition of “oceanic experience.” Her paper boats have a peculiar affinity with Gericault’s desperate raft.

    In Shallow Water, 2004 and Ebb Tide, 2004-2005, the sea withdraws to reveal the raw, incoherent terrain beneath it – a terra incognita even more elemental and disturbing than the unpredictable waters.  Sometimes Frolova is Lost on the Journey (I and II), 2005, and sometimes all is Silence, 2005.  The boat has all but disappeared, as though it has lost its meaning and sense of purpose.  It has certainly lost the grand, iconic appearance it had at The Beginning of the Journey, 2005.  There is an ironic apocalyptic edge to Frolova’s paintings, as Scene # 1, Scene # 2, and Still Life, clarify.  Catastrophe is in the making, with no salvation in sight. These paintings seem particularly Turneresque, especially by reason of their intense luminosity, which threatens to dissolve the image of the boats. They in fact disappear in Testing the Waters I and II, painted in 2005.  In Testing the Waters III, where the boat finally is launched, it triumphantly imposes its whiteness on the water.  But in Dangerous Journey, 2005 the ocean’s luminous turbulence absorbs the boat’s whiteness, trivializing it to another flicker in the chaotic void.  But all is not chaos in Frovola’s apocalyptic narrative:  the sea has its eternal rhythms, as the waves suggest, and the play of light and dark – so crucial to Frolova’s paintings – suggests an unresolvable contest of wills, which however unpredictable has its own eternal pattern.

    Frolova’s paintings are a breath of fresh emotional air in a stifling conceptual scene.  Not only do they make it clear that painting has not died – an exhausted modernist trope – but they remind us that it remains the best means of conveying inner necessity and existential feeling. Nonetheless, Frolova’s visionary paintings have their conceptual side, as her view of them as games indicates.  She has said that “the entire scope of human activity may be seen as composed of various games:  political, military, economic, religious, and erotic.”   Almost all these games are evoked by her paintings:  they are political and military in import – those with the burning boats are war scenes (they echo the many paintings of sea battles, and suggest that control of the high seas continues to be a national priority) – and also deeply mystical and erotic.  They can be arranged in a sequence that suggests the development from seductive foreplay to climactic orgasm.  Sometimes tempestuous or passively at rest, Frolova’s playful sea is the voluptuous goddess of love, as its stimulating, teasing – and sometimes taunting – details suggest.  Indeed, Frolova’s passion for painting confirms her passionate nature.  And mystical merger with the ocean – the familiar return to origins – is an ancient metaphor for consummate union with the divine.  That is what the “divine” experience of love—love at its most physically fulfilling as well as emotionally transporting – is supposed to be.

    What makes Frolova’s paintings particularly poignant is that they balance the forces of Eros and Thanatos.  “The emotions of those in the holds [of the boats] are concentrated on the search for equilibrium, for balance,” Frolova writes.  “Balance grants a sense of peace and happiness,” and, one might add, beauty, traditionally understood as the outcome or expression of harmonious balance.  The paradox of Frolova’s beautiful paintings is that they afford a deep sense of peace and happiness because they establish a subtle balance between boat and sea – the former a symbol of eternal geometry and human invention, the latter of spontaneous gesture and instinctive power – however large or small the boat, and however gesturally aroused or quiescent the sea.  At first glance, Frolova’s paintings look “unbalanced.” At second reflective glance, one realizes that they are ingeniously balanced for they reconcile the eternal opposites without letting one dominate the other, which would compromise both.

    Are Frolova’s paintings games of chance, as their fluid, seemingly unpredictable, sometimes flamboyantly metamorphosizing – not to say amorphic – details strongly suggest? Frolova is not only playing against herself  and fate  she is playing against the history of painting. In other words, while Frolova has a concept and metaphor in mind when she begins to paint, the pre-reflective action of the painting runs away with her.  Her paintings are about the vicissitudes of life; these are most convincingly conveyed through the vicissitudes of painting.  It communicates them unconsciously and more effectively than when they are consciously represented in this or that picturesque scene:  for Frolova, as for every serious painter, the problem of painting—a subjective as well as technical problem – remains constant. However, much of the human problem seems to be solved (or at least stayed) by representing it.  Frolova writes that while “people have been playing the game called Œpainting’ for a long time,” “everything [in it] depends on the qualifications (the innate abilities) of the player [painter] alone.”  This suggests that painting is a solitary game: a game in which the painter plays against herself.  William James once said that religion is what one does with one’s solitude, suggesting that for Frolova painting is a kind of religion.  But game theory reminds us that a game always involves two players, and no game is really a game of chance – chance is probability, that is, the specifiable sum of the probable choices that can be made in any game. 

    What are the choices in the game of painting?  Frolova remarks that they were once “simple,” but that they have “become more and more complex – to the point of the highest intellectualism,” At the same time, they have been “simplified to the level of the primitive – a game that anyone can play.”  Frolova is not only playing against herself – and fate – she is playing against the history of painting.  Painting is a self-reflexive game, but its reflexes are conditioned – unconsciously complicated – by history. Every new painting adapts to history by feeding back into it, just as history in effect adapts to it by feeding it.  The actual choices made are historically informed.  If not, they make no cognitive, emotional, or formal sense.  They may be historically ill-informed, but informed by precedent they must be if they are to seem “winning” or significant. Frolova’s paintings are well-informed:  they use traditional as well as modernist means; that is, they tell the basic human story in the language of pure or basic painting.

    Frolova has accomplished the postmodern task of painting – to reconcile the primitive and the intellectual.  Duchamp famously distinguished between “animal expression” and “intellectual expression” in art, preferring the latter – “art in the service of the mind” – to the former, art in the service of the body.  He regarded expressionist painting as intractably animal, dismissing it as stupidly savage – he had Fauvism in mind (the Fauvist painting he himself once poorly practiced).  His distinction was obsolete to begin with, not to say inherently absurd, for the animal body and the intellectual mind belong to the same human being.  At its best Duchamp’s distinction reflects what T. S. Eliot called the dissociation of sensibility – the separation of feeling and reason – epidemic in modernity; at its worst, the distinction is a crude, pathetic paraphrase of Cartesian dualism.  If Duchamp’s facile distinction is the root of the modern division between Expressionism and Conceptualism, as has been argued, then genuine Postmodernism reintegrates animal feeling and the reasoning intellect. Frolova’s paintings do this with remarkable conciseness:  her small, tightly constructed white paper boat is both a symbol of her body and her cunning intellect, able to comprehend the cosmos despite her limited presence in it. In the cosmic swim, Frolova is also in the swim of painting – to be at artistic risk in the daunting sea of painting is to be at existential risk in the overwhelming cosmos.  In short, Frolova’s seascapes are elemental paintings of the existential truth.  And like all authentic paintings, they are psychosomatic tours de force.

    They remind us that human beings, however many clever games they play, are animals that emerged by chance – improbably – from the sea.  They will sooner or later return to it, that is, drown in it whatever boats they build to sail on it in search of new adventures and games, including adventurous games of painting.  Life, after all, is not only not a dream, as Calderon de la Barca said, but not a game, as Frolova surely knows, for her painting games are wise defenses against the meaningless sea on which we all drift.  However much we flow with the current, as though mastering the drift, we always feel, if we deeply feel, peculiarly at a loss – displaced in a kind of twilight zone.  Frolova’s pictures are, after all, like dreams, sometimes disturbing, sometimes reassuring, but always radiant with an aura that leads us further into the mystery of being.

--Donald Kuspit
Donald Kuspit is an art critic and professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
He is a contributing editor at Artforum, Sculpture, and New Art Examiner magazines, the editor of Art Criticism, and the editor of a series on American Art and Art Criticism for Cambridge University Press.