Victoria Begalskaya displayed her two new projects at the Veretyevo Festival. The first was a series of paintings titled What Bears Think of. The other was the Confidence Trick installation.
Vika Begalskaya’s works were an ample manifestation of the psychoanalytical aspect of the Veretyevo environment. The Dubna River banks inspire blissful relaxation where the subconscious starts a heartfelt dialogue with reality, like two friends speaking and drinking after a long parting. Bears, nice Russian bears, come out of the Veretyevo forest, they are bored and exhausted by sucking their paws in their lairs during their winter rest. But the artist’s paintings depict them as some desire machines rather than animals. Vika spectacularly pleases them, throwing all sorts of new temptations into the boiling cauldron of their animal libido –vodka, women, harmonica, Kalashnikov rifle. The series is not quite complete, as a matter of fact (reality doesn’t seem to be ripe enough for it). There ought to have been a picture of the bloody redistribution of property featuring an oil pipe and combat action… But that may happen yet in the future. We believe in the discerning eye of the artist, don’t we?
The other series which requires a more profound contextualization is the Confidence Trick. Dirty male desire is projected on the ephemeral screens of pleasure, huge air matrasses, the first step in the fall from the live to the plastic woman. Vika paints traces of pleasure, lewd female bodies on them, awakening emotions ranging from shameful lust to disgust in her expressive wide brushwork. When Veretyevo assistants drag and spread out these no-nonsense layers of the subconscious on the bank of the Dubna River, many people, I think, felt like drifting on them downstream to reach the blue water of the powerful Volga River that still keeps the shameless gift of the rebellious Don Cossack in the depth of its memory.
The artist honestly admits that no human dignity can exist without a fight. “It happened so that strong men always appear by my side, and I regard it as my duty to fight with them, and I haven’t met weak men somehow.” This psychological setup provides a key to the understanding of the diverse creations of Vika Begalskaya, of her video, performances, installations. It funds both her painting manner, her brushwork style, and color combinations. The everpresent theme of fighting for her identity helps her create not only expressive figurative compositions with elements of mass culture, but also drag the thoroughly hushed down and hidden patriarchy pattern, which conditions definite views, into the zone of visual perception. I cannot judge whether its incursion into the Veretyevo context was an objective observation or a whim of female fantasy, but this context clearly lacked something of that sort.

Their energy is storming – what submission, readiness, languor, helplessness, depravity are in the women of Vika Begalska; it is just “take me”, nothing else. What color! You feel like squinting as if on a sunny day; why are they so vital, authentic, these girls, why are they so unnaturally blue or green, like swamp sludge, so disproportionate, intimidating?
Begalska’s work with emotions is fantastic, she works with emotion and nothing else; what vitality is in her characters, what power, despair; I don’t really know whether they are ALLEINE, but they are surely Unforgettable.