Olga Petrova
Dreams in Colour

Grown-ups are not supposed to believe in miracles. Modern-day world favours clarity, rationality, and well-defined boundaries between the real and the imaginary. Olga Petrova’s paintings, however, stand in quiet defiance of this dogma. Rather than challenging reality, she subtly offers a new way of looking at it.

An academically trained artist, Olga devises her own visual language, fusing classical painterly skills with inner freedom and intuition. The fairy-tale aspect of Petrova’s artworks is neither a backdrop nor an illustration, but a distinct way to see the world as a place operating according to a dreamlike logic and devoid of an ordinary sequence of events, hence summoning a sensation of struggling to recall an elusive night vision. In it, anyone can inhabit a bird’s nest, tame a friendly dragon, sleep peacefully atop a cushiony bear or encounter one’s own double. Animals are full-fledged inhabitants of this domain: neither characters nor symbols, they act as guides, silent guardians, and witnesses.

Equally naive and exact, this imagery requires no explanation, because one sees it not as a fantasy, but as a memory of something familiar yet lost in the process of growing up. At the same time, Olga’s works eschew deliberate childishness. Contrariwise, their gentleness seems to disguise a more mature approach: thoughtful, slightly tongue-in-cheek, and fully aware of the fragility of this world. Instead of taking us back to our childhood, the artist makes an attempt to restore our ability to see life as a miracle. Her colourful dreams are not a form of escapism, but a special state of mind in which reality reveals itself more accurately and profoundly, offering a chance to slow down, refocus, and ultimately discover that, instead of disappearing, the miracle has grown more demure, revealing itself only to those who believe in it.