Alena Rezanova

Year of birth: 1985.
Where do you live: Orlando, Florida, USA.
Describe your art in three words: Immersive. Transformative. Reinterpreting.
Your discipline: My discipline is a fusion of painting, digital experimentation, and AI-driven exploration. I work with oil paints using my hands, creating fluid, immersive landscapes that exist between abstraction and figuration. My practice is rooted in intuition, emotion, and a deep fascination with perception—how color, form, and texture influence our subconscious. Through my work, I seek to create portals for reflection, transformation, and reinterpretation of reality.
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Your artistic journey spans multiple disciplines, from photography to digital retouching, and now painting. How did this evolution come about, and what does painting represent for you as a medium of self-expression?

My art is always a search—a search for meaning, balance, and a new visual reality. My creative journey began with photography, then deepened into retouching. At some point, I realized that I wanted to go beyond commercial visuals and find my own language. Painting became that language for me. As the complete opposite of photography and retouching, where much of the focus is on interfaces, pixels, and technique, here I interact with paint directly, allowing the process to be alive, sensory, and physically tangible. I paint with oil using my hands and fingers, feeling the material tactually, without the intermediary of brushes. For me, painting is not just a visual language but a way to reconstruct reality, to find a balance between abstraction and form, emotion and structure. It is my way of being honest with myself. Artificial intelligence has also become part of this search. I use it not as a replacement for creativity but as a tool for exploring new combinations of forms, textures, and ideas. It helps me visualize what is hidden in the unconscious.

You’ve mentioned that your art serves as a point of stillness in a chaotic world. Can you elaborate on how your work creates this sense of calm, and what tools or techniques you use to achieve this?

The world is fast-paced, chaotic, and filled with an endless race for goals. In this rhythm, it’s easy to lose yourself. My art is a point of grounding—a space where one can slow down, dissolve into color, and feel harmony. I create fluid forms, avoiding sharp angles. Our subconscious perceives smooth lines as safe, natural, and calming. The color transitions in my work are soft, gradient, and harmoniously contrasted. My paintings are vivid and alive, yet they don’t shout—they draw you inward, inviting contemplation. I paint with oil using my hands, without brushes. This allows the colors to flow, merge, and blend naturally. While I have digital references, I always choose colors intuitively—the process itself guides me. My works are an invitation to dialogue, to reflection, to an inner journey. There are no right or wrong interpretations—only the experience of immersing yourself and feeling. In my new series, DreamScapes, I create imaginary landscapes of the inner world. These are realms where one retreats to explore oneself, to find balance, to realize that life is not just an endless pursuit of goals but also a fascinating journey toward the absolute. I do not offer solutions or provide ready-made answers. Instead, I create a space where the viewer can immerse themselves and explore. They may see only my vision or enrich it with their own meanings. It’s like a set of metaphorical maps—each person finds something uniquely their own.

Alena Rezanova | Dream Scapes

How does your background in advertising and marketing influence the way you approach your art today, especially in terms of visual composition and aesthetic choices?

My experience in advertising and marketing has given me a fundamental understanding of the psychology of perception. I have studied in depth how people react to visual imagery and how personality archetypes resonate on a subconscious level. Working with major brands, I analyzed advertising campaigns—how composition is structured, how colors interact, and how meaning is conveyed through visuals. This gave me a trained eye and an understanding of how to influence the viewer’s perception. But in advertising, there is always a clear message: problem—solution. People are offered access to an illusion of happiness through consumption. In art, I take the opposite approach—I don’t provide ready-made answers but create space for reflection. I want the viewer to slow down, to think about themselves—who they are, what they desire, where they are headed. To see their own inner beauty, because that is what shapes how we perceive the world. If there is harmony, beauty, and love within, then the surrounding reality becomes less aggressive. In 2019, while working in advertising photography, I realized that I was bringing other people’s ideas to life, with little room for my own voice. I lacked depth and meaning. I wanted every encounter with my work—whether visual or verbal—to leave people with something to reflect on, new insights that could shift their perspective, perhaps even change their lives. That was when I understood it was time to step into pure art, where meaning emerges from the process itself rather than being imposed from the outside.

You integrate artificial intelligence into your creative process. Can you walk us through how AI helps you explore new forms, textures, and ideas within your artwork?

For me, artificial intelligence is a tool that allows me to explore the new. I use it in the reference creation stage to combine the incompatible, discover unexpected forms and textures. It helps me visualize what is hidden in the subconscious, bringing to life images I sense but cannot immediately articulate. I don’t give AI control over the art—it’s not about replacing the artist but about expanding creative boundaries. I take ideas generated by algorithms and then transform them by hand, filtering them through my own perception. In the end, each piece is something entirely new, born at the intersection of technology and human intuition.

The Russian and European avant-garde movements are a source of inspiration for you. In what ways do their boldness and drive to create order from chaos reflect in your current work?

What inspires me in Russian and European avant-garde movements is their boldness—they were unafraid to experiment, explore the new, and break outdated forms. They placed ideas above academic technique, and this principle resonates deeply with me. I, too, am an explorer and experimenter, drawn to discovering fresh perspectives on the familiar. Vasily Kandinsky is especially close to me—his approach to color and form as carriers of emotion, his idea of “painting music,” and creating visual rhythm. He showed that painting can be more than just a representation of reality, which aligns with my own method. I also strive to convey emotional states through color, fluid forms, and the balance between chaos and order. Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the “infra-thin”—the barely perceptible boundary between an object and its idea, between the material and the conceptual—also inspires me. This idea speaks to my own work, as I exist at the intersection of traditional painting and digital technologies, constantly questioning where the boundary lies between the artificial and the living, between what is consciously created and what emerges by chance. And, of course, Pablo Picasso—his fearless deconstruction of form, experiments with perspective, and multilayered imagery. In my own art, I also strive for a new reading of the familiar, for a dialogue between chaos and harmony, structure and intuition. My work exists at the crossroads of timeless values and modern technology. I explore questions that are relevant in any era but express them in the language of today. My collaboration with artificial intelligence is an element of provocation. Art has always been considered something purely human, created by the artist “from the mind.” But I see it differently. We all draw ideas from the collective unconscious, and for me, AI is its conscious extension—a repository of knowledge that we ourselves have filled. By using AI in my practice, I explore how technology can become a tool for dialogue with our inner world and the deeper layers of perception. Avant-garde artists sought a new order within chaos, and I am doing the same—only on a new level, using the possibilities of the digital age.

In your artist statement, you talk about seeking harmony in contrasts. How do you balance abstraction and figuration in your art, and what role does this play in the messages you aim to convey?

In my “DreamScapes” series, I balance between abstraction and figurative art, using recognizable natural forms—the sea, rocks, deserts. The viewer identifies them, finds a point of reference, yet the colors are far from natural. They are dreamlike, illusory, creating the sensation of a dreamscape. This series plays with the interaction between the conscious and the subconscious. The mind clings to familiar shapes, but the color disrupts conventional perception, transforming the landscape into a flow, into movement. It mirrors the way our thoughts work—we try to structure chaos, yet it always remains fluid. This balance is essential to my art because it reflects the very nature of perception. We exist on the edge of the real and the subjective, between what we see and what we feel. I want the viewer not just to look at the painting but to feel it, to immerse themselves in this dialogue between form and emotion.

You describe your art as a portal inward, a space for personal reflection. How do you hope viewers engage with your work, and what do you want them to take away from the experience?

My paintings are a portal inward, a space for exploration. “DreamScapes” is an opportunity to pause, slow down, and truly feel the moment. For me, these works evoke a sense of fulfillment. In life, we rarely experience it—it is ephemeral, fleeting, quickly replaced by a new pursuit. But through color, form, and fluid lines, I create a space one can return to in order to reconnect with that feeling. I don’t offer the viewer ready-made answers, but I want my paintings to spark a process of introspection. “What does my inner world look like? Where is its center? Where is my point of balance that brings me harmony?” Most often, people respond with a sense of awe. They say something has resonated with them, yet they can’t quite explain what it is. And that is the magic—because art doesn’t work through logic, but through feelings, which cannot always be put into words.