Flora Yukhnovich: The Venice Paintings

This painting is based on The Apotheosis of The Pisani Family (1761-62), a fresco in Villa Pisani, Stra which is a perfect example of the way Tiepolo creates islands of information which the eye zips between, sort of like a pinball. It echoes the feeling of walking through Venice, down densely packed alleyways, which suddenly open out into wide expanses of water. I wanted to explore that notion of pace with this work, looking at the journey the eye takes though the painting, how it might rest at a point of discernible figuration or travel through busy clusters before being flung out into the space between.

I kept thinking about the difference between Venetian and French rococo. Venetian rococo has a distinctive treatment of space which is logical, organised in planes like a theatre set. I wondered if I could knit the layers together using Tiepolo’s diagonal movements to collapse the space at points in the composition, bringing paint to the fore. I wanted it to feel as if it were undoing and reforming itself across the whole picture plain as well as in the figuration. This painting, based on Francesco Zuccarelli’s The Rape of Europa (between 1740 and 1750) in the Accademia, combined with some of the French figures and fleshy forms I had looked at before, feels like a synthesis of what I learned in Venice and ideas I had been working on back home (looking at the French fête galante genre and converting it into sort of all female garden of Eden).

Fantasia, 2019, is one of a number of paintings created by Flora Yukhnovich during a two-month residency in 2019 in the Venice studio established by Victoria Miro for invited artists to spend extended time in the historic city and make new bodies of work. Using the opportunity to engage more fully with Venetian culture, Yukhnovich was able to study first hand one of her key influences, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, including ceiling frescoes in the Ca’Rezzonico museum and the Chiesa Santa Maria della Visitazione. Writing about this work at the time of its completion, the artist commented, ‘I made this work looking at Nuptial Allegory (1757), a fresco by Tiepolo at Ca’Rezzonico, a beautiful Venetian palazzo filled with eighteenth-century treasures. I’m always drawn to the flamboyance of Rococo art and this fresco is irresistibly over-the-top. It feels very fantastical, almost Disney-esque. Making this work was a chance for me to explore Tiepolo’s pinks and indulge in the more sugary parts of his work. I wanted my painterly gesture to capture an attitude of fantasy and flourish in a dreamlike way, without having to fully articulate the imagery.’

I read Casanova’s memoir when I arrived on the residency to get a taste of 18 th century Venice. He describes Venice as a kind of mecca for pleasure. This painting is based on Carnival Scene (The Minuet) 1754-55 by Giandomenico Tiepolo depicting the Carnival at its peak, when it ran for 6 months each year. I wanted to capture a sense of pleasure in the paint texture, the sumptuousness of the silky dress, and a feeling of dancing movement as many different revellers and commedia dell'arte characters from many different art historical paintings overlap and collide.