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"LADY WITH THE FERRET" by NATALIE JACQUOUNAIN

(Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism)

J. L. Borges described Segalen as one of the most intelligent writers on our planet.

Of the latter he claimed: you can read Segalen in less than a month, but it takes the rest of your life to begin to understand him.

Who is, indeed, this mysterious "other" for Segalen? It's the different, the one not "domesticated".

The writer loved the art of the one who, through the latter, was dragged towards the unknown, who had the charisma of the dissimilar, whose innocence must be preserved and guarded in a "shameless" way.

An elected and refined meditation, that of the author, who finds an elusive concreteness in the "sacred prose", figured by Natalia Joacquounain.

Through the canvas "Woman with ferret" The Russian artist pays homage to Raffaello Sanzio, offering the observer a neo-Renaissance echo of "Lady with the Unicorn".

The eye of the spectator inevitably undergoes the magic of an atmosphere, which seems to whisper at the climax an adorable interior delirium.

The artist guards the feminine being there, celebrating its inviolability: the dwelling in a refined and fascinating context, in which she becomes the apex, the pure reflection.

The thought becomes mystical and hidden: the posture of the woman, whose leg overlaps the other, thus hiding its nature from the human eye, consecrates its confidentiality.

She cloaks her in grey: a transitional tint, this one, which sublimates her within the crowd of precious values such as intelligence, balance and wisdom.

The subject of the canvas reflects the apogee of a crescendo of "states of being" that alternate and resolve between the sphere that contemplates the meditative nobility (marked by the color blue) and the one that embraces the marriage between the divine and the human (expressed by the purple hue).

Leonardo da Vinci chooses the ermine, to attribute to the lady qualities such as nobility and purity; Raffaello Sanzio, instead, the unicorn, to indicate her innocence.

Natalia Jacquounain approaches a ferret.

Unlike the two works mentioned above, in which woman and animal are accompanied together, in a single effigy, the aesthete, in "Woman with Ferret" liberates the beast from the woman.

The ferret, a symbol of intuition, agility and prudence in judgments, to which the woman's gaze is directed, becomes the depository of the talents with which she will face deformity herself.

The necklace, red in color, on the mustelid is a distinctive sign of belonging.

Natalia Jacquounain creates here a context which, by inspiration of the content, the choice of colors and the composition, disturbs to the point of removing the spectator, leading him outside him.

There, he remains suspended: on the threshold of this enigmatic emanation of otherness... enraptured and, why not, even destabilized by it.