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One way or another, celebrities finish in huge snowballs. Speaking figuratively. Having stopped working hard once - you are forgotten and buried. If obsessed by narcissism - nobody sees a true face behind the star shining of the white snow. So on and so forth. To save the time, Tanya Snezh Lebedeva sends media icons to their Last Shooting, where she places them under her pseudonym. What a final metaphor - to wrap up a star into yourself and issue it in one copy - canvas, oil, all that stuff.
Tanya characterizes her genre as ironical conceptualism. By conceptual art we usually mean art of pure intelligence; artistic impulse is excluded, making room for planning and construction; expression is displaced by a cold calculation... Meanwhile in Snezh's paintings intolerable positive is all around. In the series Frailty of Fame the objects of her art are Yayoi Kusama, Naomi Campbell, Fyodor Konyukhov, Statue of Liberty, Barbie – pop mainstream heroes. You "can read the series like a book" (Snezh), the form of comics and the claimed irony show that there's no other alternative: Tanya's paintings are pop art.
Tanya has excellent economic education and MBA diploma and she could hardly miss the book by Skatershtikov Skate's Art Investment Handbook. Besides the demystification of ‘art as a mystery' with the help of market driven approach, the book gives a clear idea about pop art as the most underestimated contemporary art stream with the boosting potential for growth. But how Snezh will take this niche, when the main problem about pop art is that without a sixty year-old provenance it does not cost a thing, though a lot of people like it. Tanya solves this problem, and wearing her striped socks steps on the way of progressive memetics. The new made up genre is like a shell of an old fine pop-art-meme - it is a marketing innovation necessary for not taking what is tasty for what is trivial by mistake.
Snezh is an artist in a mask. But it would be a mistake to think that her easy image conceals the described analytical approach. Just the other way round, this approach disguises her initial anti-conceptual expressive ego: “I am not the mistress of what is going on in my paintings” (Snezh). A positive impulse which is at the heart of Snezh’s art can keep its original form only when it’s gone through piles of senses. Tanya Snezh Lebedeva is an artist in a mask of Tanya Snezh Lebedeva. Between these two identical faces ironical conceptualism is like a denominative of any art theory. Ironical conceptualism is only necessary to prove that it is needless, that art can be perceived directly: in the form of pure color expression and emotions free of any sense. With the help of this ironical game of conceptualism Tanya informs that you should treat her art in all seriousness – treat it as a joke.
