Poetic beauty

Djina Chemtov’s paintings are infused with a strange, profoundly poetic beauty. They focus on the gaze, the gaze of a woman with a slender face and a pensive countenance. She has large almond-shaped dark eyes filled with memories, conveyers of an age-old memory, her head is slightly bent over her shoulder as if in a stand-by position of prayer or contemplation.
Djina’s work is situated at the convergence of several traditions, at the crossroads of the most ancient -even archaic influences, such as rock painting or Byzantine primitives, and tendencies specific to western painting of the modern era, from Botticelli to Gauguin.
Djina’s nudes, as if caught in an interrupted and unfinished movement, evolve in a timeless grace.
Her writing –for what other term can be used to describe a work made with typographic ink on paper– is at once poetic and philosophical.
Her characters have a mysterious beauty about them that seem to be emanating from distant lands, as if lost deep in thought. Their solemn dialogues wonder about the question of being and good and evil. Their eyes, frozen in desire and sadness, never meet.
As if reconnecting bonds decades later, perhaps Djina subconsciously restores Modigliani’s lost sketches of Anna Akhmatova.

-Marc Sagnol
Translated from French by Mary Gomez