Smirnoff’s champion for The Wick is critic, curator and educator, Darren Jones. Jones believes “Smirnoff has an exceedingly rare intuition for extracting the most compelling elements from her encyclopedic array of sources—art historical, humanistic, philosophical—then distilling them into a visual language that exudes preternatural magnetism.” Jones pins this ability to a “combination of Smirnoff’s avid intellectual curiosity, reverence for the natural world, and a commitment to the tradition formulation and technical potential of the lustrous egg tempera that is a hallmark of her practice. The artist’s generosity and openness toward the autonomy, or value, of the viewer’s phenomenological responses to her work, only enriches its effects.”

Jones adds that Smirnoff’s paintings are of “such emotional charge and ethereality that one longs to step through them and be consumed within their beguiling atmospherics. At the very heart of her subject matter—vast skies, deep forests, oracular figures—is the relationship between individual and cosmological, and to the unseen filaments that connect the mystical and quotidian. Smirnoff divines an enigmatic arc that we can trace from artist, to audience and beyond into the possibilities of uncharted plains, both terrestrial and astrophysical.”

Veronica Smirnoff’s latest exhibition, Blue Sky Red, at Candida Stevens Gallery at Cromwell Place, showcases a new medium for the artist – tapestry. These collaborative pieces translate the enigma and awe of Smirnoff’s egg tempera paintings into a tactile new language, still steeped in a long, international heritage and craftsmanship. This is the way Smirnoff communicates both past and present in her works, with what the artist has previously referred to as the “abiding sense of art history is ever present in my work.”

“I have always been interested in the construction of the iconic, the “Icon” as the object of worship and its relationship to “popular art” with a wide repertoire of signs: the flat moulding of figures, schematic linearity and cut-out two-dimensional quality, the abstract effects of colour, flatness and tilted depth.” Smirnoff has said.

Smirnoff’s magic is in daring to depict a rich interior imaginary, free and fantastical, and her willingness to challenge and interrogate, by the same hand, the logic we try to hold up to understand and analyse our surroundings and “incomprehensible things that sooner or later find meaning and teach us something about the real world.”