Galerie Pénélope continues to meet inspiring personalities, and this time it is Nina Koltchitskaia who graciously lends herself to the game. 

 

Nina grew up in Russia, then moved to Laos and Italy before settling in France, in Paris. These successive moves crystallized her fear of forgetting, and she soon felt the urgency to capture the evanescent beauty of life's moments. Coming from a family of artists, she was encouraged to photograph and draw in order to fix her memories. One of the things that strikes you when you meet Nina is her poetry. In her words, in the stories she tells, and of course in her paintings. Her work reminds us of "the spring [which] gloats everywhere", a phrase of Jean Cocteau with whom she shares an obvious plastic and poetic link.

 

 

Nina has a particular affection for old objects, bearers of history(s). As part of her collaboration with David Mechali, she paints on antique poetry books that she herself has selected for their previously "touched and loved" paper and thus possessing a particular vibration. For Nina is one of those who believe in resonance. "Everything is alive", she says, "objects carry a bit of the history of the person who owned them".

It's the same with jewellery. Nina recalls for us her first memories and with them her grandmother's jewellery. She evokes "very tender visual vestiges" where she sees her "putting on her earrings, making herself beautiful".

 

Discover the romantic selection of our muse.

 

 

Flowers

"There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them". This quote from Henri Matisse characterises Nina, who has a thirst for beauty and poetry and draws her inspiration from everywhere. Flowers and her are a crazy love story: her paintings and photographs are filled with colourful bouquets.

And then her grandmother's precious rings come back: one with an emerald, the other with a sapphire in a setting diamondsHer incredible giardinetti brooch "with each flower in a different colour". Nina takes us into her secret garden... filled with daisies !

 

 

 

 

 

Love

Nina's work begins with "Left Hand Lovers", a series of drawings on soft pink paper, made with her left hand, even though she is right-handed. The result is a series of drawings "from the hand of the heart The result is a series of drawings "from the left hand" with lines that are as timid, a little clumsy and beautiful as budding love affairs. Like her collaboration with Rouje, the brand of her friend Jeanne Damas for the benefit of the Maison des Femmes, it seems that each of her projects follows Nina's heart.

 And isn't love at first sight Cupid's business? In mythology, whoever is hit by his arrows falls in love instantly. Just like Nina with our fine pearl and diamond pendant!

 

 

 

Music

As part of the exhibition "La Femme fleur et l'oiseau" (The Flower Woman and the Bird), Nina and her friend David Mechali proposed a meeting between music and painting at the Hôtel Arvor: "that of happy accidents, between the colours of music and the dance [of Nina's] paintings". A bridge between their two delicate and dreamlike worlds.

"Each music composed here [...] is a bird in the sky" writes Nina on the cover of the exhibition catalogue and vinyl. This sentence perfectly sums up the jewellery she has chosen: a swallow brooch and a ring in the shape of a lyre. The instrument reminds us once again of Cocteau and his passion for the myth of Orpheus. Do you know the story? Mad with grief at the death of his wife Eurydice, he goes down to the Underworld to look for her by seducing all the creatures that reside there with his lyre. The one selected by Nina is sold out, but we still have one with turquoise available. here !

 

 

 

 

Colour(s)

The second obvious influence in Nina's painting is Henri Matisse, to whom reference has already been made. This incredible colourist began drawing with a box of pastels given to him by his mother to entertain him as a child during a long convalescence. Matisse borrowed his coloured shadows from the Impressionists, but soon concentrated his research on the simplicity of form and pure colour, which found their most appropriate expression in the paper cut-outs of his later years. Her work is tender, joyful and colourful, just like Nina's. Violet amethystblue sapphire and emerald green: she creates her own palette of colours among our antique rings.

 

 

 

 

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Discover Nina's poetic and delicate universe via her Instagram accountand "stay tuned" as she says!