Katya Rashkevich

What should be the photo? Real up to every plank on a wooden house? Fabulous to the point that you already believe, this is not a photograph, is it a painting? Old, black and white, to the depths of the mysterious eyes of women of the early twentieth century? Truthful, so truthful that you will dream at night and frighten faces with sewn-up mouths or bodies of murdered and mutilated children? What should be the photo? Maybe just a family one? Everyone has their own answer.

I love photographs, which are photographs, which are not paintings, which were not created using photoshop. I love photography. Especially black and white. Especially from family photo albums. But one photographer, and most likely a very dreamy girl, Katya Rashkevich managed to make me fall in love with her photographic paintings, with her fairy-tale worlds. Worlds from the depths of the subconscious, worlds-associations. However, perhaps the whole point is that I have always been interested in Dali's paintings. And in the works of Katya Rashkevich, the element of surrealism is still there. She may well be called Dali from photography.

Katya Rashkevich is a photographer from Moscow, she is a wedding photographer. But I saw her wedding photos much later and they did not cause delight in me. It was her photo art that hooked me. There are so many fairy-tale characters in these photos! Here are Alice, the girl Suok, and Mary Poppins. And also Charlotte. Imagine, she portrayed Charlotte! Yes, that same apple pie. Charlotte turned out to be wonderful, autumnal, with an apple in the form of a hat, red. And how touching and sweet the girl feeding the birds is! Next to her is a dog, and in her hands she carefully holds a crust of bread. And how tender and beautiful in winter she is Snowflake!

In her fairy-tale world, the world of unbridled fantasy, there is both a skyscraper ship and a strong girl who pulls the same skyscraper ship along the coast, where toy boats are scattered. The next photo - and here the girl is swimming under water, both the sofa and the clock are swimming under the water. And the clock ... Now she is an analogy with Salvador Dali! Quite obvious. And conscious? And also a cat flying in a balloon, or a boot under sail. What is there in this wonderful world! But her works are far from bright, joyful and carefree. No, far from it. In her works, even the sunniest, it would seem, there is some kind of anxiety and darkness. The tales of Katya Rashkevich are far from kind and not bright, they disturbing and gloomy... But at the same time they are so attractive ...

Her work is evaluated in different ways: from complete delight to complete denial. From admitting that she really is a real artist to being accused of being artificial. Her work has been distributed on various Internet sites. Someone admires, someone laughs, someone scolds. But I saw the most accurate definition for her work in one short comment, namely: "quality nonsense." That was the commentary. Qualitative nonsense, magnificent nonsense. Real, almost like Dali's, surreal nonsense. And this is great!