“Art as a way back to yourself”: the personal and the digital in Darya Prosuntsova’s work

Hi everyone! Welcome to issue 28 of our #ourstudents series — a run of interviews in which our students talk about themselves and their art.

In this issue I’d like to introduce you to the contemporary artist Darya Prosuntsova. Darya told us about her path into art, her search for a visual language of her own, and how she holds vulnerability and irony together in a single painting.

We met at Oktava, when I came to give a lecture. Thinking back to that time — what did art look like to you then, in 2022, and what does it look like now? What has changed?

I got to know contemporary art long before 2022. In 2017, for instance, I spent my whole birthday at Erarta in St. Petersburg. And when I lived in Moscow I was a regular at Winzavod. So I knew art history, and I understood that there is a classical, academic school and there is a contemporary approach. I could see that in contemporary art the idea comes first, and that to understand it you have to get into the context. But it was a surface-level understanding. I looked at contemporary art from the outside, now and then trying to work out the meaning of pieces that grabbed me visually.

Now I’m much more immersed — I look at it from the inside. I watch what devices other artists use, how they work with perception, what kind of experience they build for the viewer. I train my eye every day and keep discovering new names on the Russian and international art scene. Right now, for example, I’m writing this on the Lastochka train, and today I’m planning to visit GES-2 and Cosmoscow.

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How did you come to contemporary art? What were you doing before that?

My path into contemporary art was a fairly steady one. It started in childhood with art school, then I got a degree in graphic design. I worked in the field for the first few years, then moved into marketing. After my son was born I decided not to go back to that, and studied illustration instead. It let me work remotely and combine work with motherhood. At some point I realized the digital world was starting to swallow me. I wanted to come back out of the virtual and work with a physical medium. I chose oil. I learned to paint with it under Tanya Ivankova at the online studio Radiopaint. Tanya is a wonderful teacher, and her approach to painting is nothing like what I’d been taught before. It was an absolute match — I fell in love with oil and knew that life without it would never feel right again 🙂 So I started looking for a way to paint. At first I worked at home, but with a small child that was not a great idea.

After a long search I finally found a studio and started working regularly. And I realized that simply painting canvases wasn’t enough. I wanted to go deeper into the work behind the idea and figure out what I want to say with my art and what to do with it. The prospect of painting for the drawer and handing out pictures to friends and relatives on birthdays didn’t appeal to me. That’s how I ended up on your course. And it was the best decision I could have made!

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Tell us about your art: what themes do you work with? How do you open them up?

The running theme of my art is making sense of what reality is and how people perceive it today, through the lens of personal and collective experience. I’m aware of how dependent I am on the digital environment; I accept that part of my life, but I keep looking for balance, converting my memories and highlights back into the real world through a medium as archaic as oil paint.

The thought that our perception of reality is always subjective, always dependent on whoever is doing the perceiving, frightens and fascinates me at the same time. A reality in which the digital and the material are no longer separable, and in which we consume information faster and faster.

A world where it’s EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. How do you take all that in and stay sane, mentally and physically healthy? How far can I change my own perception if I can’t change reality itself — and without escaping into fantasy?

Working on the plasticity of perception became my way out and my answer to those questions. Ever since childhood I’ve caught the lags and glitches in ordinary reality, and they’ve taught me not to see the world from one single correct angle and to keep a bit of irony about everything. Having accepted that reality comes in many formats, I try to reflect that in my work.

I work with my personal photo archive, taking everyday scenes and giving them a different reading. By deconstructing form, distorting colour and adding digital artefacts, I model a reality of my own. These devices make it harder to read what’s happening on the canvas in only one way, which opens up room for the viewer’s own interpretations.

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Tell us about one particular piece — something that would give people a sense of your art.

I think “Doomscrolling” is the most representative piece at the moment. The image and the title speak for themselves. That painting is a picture of how tired I am of the digital environment.

It’s the kind of dependency where you pour hours into news and other content that only makes you feel worse. The digitalisation of our lives worries me. Ted Gioia, who has written a lot of non-fiction, recently showed in his research that we’ve moved out of the age of entertainment and into the age of distraction. Distraction is eating entertainment alive. The fastest-growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Call it scrolling, swiping, killing time, whatever you like. It isn’t art and it isn’t entertainment — it’s just continuous activity. Every stimulus lasts a few seconds and then has to be repeated. It’s a huge business, and it will soon be bigger than art and entertainment combined. This isn’t just a hot trend of 2024. It could last forever, because it rests on body chemistry rather than on fashion or taste. Our brains reward these short bursts of distraction. Dopamine is released, it makes us feel good, and we want the stimulus again. It’s an addiction loop, and the media cartels push it on us deliberately. This is our dystopian future. Less Orwell’s 1984 than Huxley’s Brave New World.

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Is there a piece among your works that you’d call a manifesto?

I don’t think I have a manifesto piece. I’m a young artist, and my visual language and method are still taking shape. Every new work has moments that land, and those pieces are what’s assembling the puzzle of my style.

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What has been the hardest part of the journey so far? What do you think are the main difficulties a beginning artist runs into?

The hard part was working out what I’m about as an artist, what matters enough for me to say it to a viewer. Nobody asked us questions like that while I was getting my academic training, so I had to spend a long time digging around inside myself and reflecting. That’s not always a pleasant process. I think every beginning artist runs into this in one form or another.

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What keeps you going on this path in art?

What holds me up is that I made a choice and decided to go this way. As they say, there’s no road back 🙂 What the road will look like, time will tell. I believe that succeeding at anything takes genuine interest in the process, discipline and hard work.

The only person who can get in my way is me. Self-sabotage is always an option, of course, but I’m pretty ruthless with myself (in a good way).

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What inspires you?

Very simple, everyday things: beautiful light, an odd shadow, an interesting reflection. Nature, music, walking on my own. Same as everyone. There’s one more important and inexhaustible source of inspiration — my son. I love making creative things together with him and watching how brilliantly he finds form, experiments with materials, mixes colours. There are more of his works hanging in our flat than mine. And I have plenty to learn from him.

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Would you call your work metamodernist? If so, why?

Yes, because I’m a product of metamodernism myself, and my work is an extension of how I see and reflect the reality we all live in. In it I balance between irony and a vulnerability that sometimes verges on naivety, between beauty and ugliness, love and disgust. It’s a constant oscillation, existing at two diametrically opposite poles at once.

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What matters to you in art — in yours, and in art generally?

Authenticity, honesty, depth, precision.

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Has our program been useful to you? If so, how?

In every way 🙂 Before the course I felt like a blind kitten. I had no idea what the art world actually was or what movements existed inside it. Or how a commercial artist’s strategy differs from an institutional one. The list goes on and on.

The program gave me a rounded understanding of how the contemporary art world works, plus practical skills — from putting together an artist’s documents to developing an exhibition project. It opened up all sorts of subtleties and details that are worth keeping in mind. But the most important thing is that the program changed the way I see. My layperson’s view of art was replaced by something much deeper.

And really, that impulse to go deeper, to ask yourself questions and check in with your inner compass, is a meta-skill — useful and applicable far beyond art. The whole program is built so that we pick it up as we go. Maria finds a thousand and one ways to teach us this. Her question — “And how does that sit with you?” — pushes you to build inner supports and become your own authority. To my mind, that’s the best thing an artist can take away.