Dasha Delone. Not only animals. Dasha Delone. Not only animals. | Page 11

It all started with dragons and fish. The creatures were virtually alive, almost
independent of the authors will. The way naïve painters like to put it: I was
about to paint something quite different, but this one appeared by its own out
of nowhere. While painting a tram Dasha Delone gets a dragon; she is painting
a fish – and all of a sudden the Parcae saddle its chine.
Dasha Delone’s art makes me muse on the artistic avant-garde – and to
perceive it as the kind of art that is by no means based on an ideology or a
philosophy of any kind. Avant-garde is rather a sort of a fair-tale existentialism
– actually a variant of realism, but of the realism dealing with its specific,
totally exotic reality.
Avant-garde as it reveals itself in Dasha Delone’s works is the creativity based
upon the centuries-long cultural experience of a metropolitan dweller who is
not all the while suppressed by the burden of his cultural background – but
instead knows how to pilot his old-timer aeroplane toward the territory with
the climate ideally tuned up for dragons to live.
Early in the 1990s Dasha Delone and her friends founded a nonconformist
art-group “The Three Oranges”, but the time in those days was not ripe for
nonconformity. Nowadays she is a co-founder of “Everything is Art” assoc