In August 2021 the Russian art magazine КЛАУЗУРА (Clause) printed a long article by Tamara Zinovieva about Yana Ezar and her work; you can read the whole article here (in Russian). We have paraphrased here some of her main points, and can think of no better way of introducing Ezar’s work.

Yana Ezar’s painting is about sex, unregulated and deviant sex, orgiastic, violent and unbridled, and her creative impulse has its source in eros and libido. She paints both landscapes and still lifes, but the full power of her talent is revealed in her erotic work. Her art breaks the blocks of the subconscious, maintaining the integrity of the external and internal, what art historians old-fashionedly call the unity of form and content. The colourful mass of her canvases immerses us in the primary material and corporeal element, returning perception to immediate, undifferentiated sensibility. With a confident and free brush, with elastic and pliable strokes, naked figures are sculpted with volume and weight. The figures are anatomically correct and beautiful, materially one with their environment, mixed with the same colourful strokes. Her spaces have a hint of depth, but rather than clear three-dimensionality hers is a loose relief, whose depth is conditional. What emerges is a sense of space created by the experience of sensations that have something tangible as their source. Yana’s paintwork is reminiscent of sculpting from melted plasticine that hardens under the hand.
     Yana does not hide sex or shyly aestheticise it, but accepts it with delight. She is the heir of antiquity, when eros was seen as a world-building and decidedly positive principle. Her art is a return, beyond censorship and lies, to the pure source of life. In an era of new prudishness, sex revolutionaries are fighting a rearguard battle, and Yana Ezar, with her retro-idyllic golden age harmony, is one of the few remaining sexual revolutionaries. In order to justify such art, well-meaning criticism has to be disingenuous – they say these are not primarily bodies engaged in intimacy, this is painting. But no, these are precisely bodies, our bodies, beautiful, healthy and harmonious, enjoying life to its creative and joyous full.