Between Then and Now: Marina Fedorova on the Beauty of Nostalgia

Nostalgia reveals itself not as a retreat into the past, but in its truest sense as a language of refinement and well-being, a silent sanctuary woven from memory, emotion, and time. There is a beautiful expression that says the past is a paradise we can never return to.

We can draw it and through drawing, this nostalgia returns the artist, again and again, to places they once knew, or to places they dream of reaching one day. Nature preserves its landscapes majestically, while interior spaces hold the traces of those who once lived in them, carrying within themselves the weight of the colours and the burden of memory. A painting, then, is not simply a depiction of reality, but a quiet attempt to rebuild a feeling and to preserve what time takes away in its own way.

For me personally, this idea is geographic and deeply personal, stretching between cultures and cities from Saint Petersburg to Munich, and through travels across Europe toward imagined inner landscapes. Some places stay with us long after we leave them, and some of them grow more beautiful with time, precisely because they are no longer accessible as they once were. And here, nostalgia becomes a bridge not only between past and present, but between different versions of ourselves. Nostalgia has always been borderless in my practice, drawing me back, time and again, to the dialogue between stillness and movement. Many of my works are born from cinematic impressions: the atmospheric haze reminiscent of Twin Peaks, the sensory melancholy of Wong Kar-wai, or the romance that refuses to fade as in Casablanca. And recently, the magnificent visual world of Dune has contributed to shaping new visual narratives within my work.

Nostalgia is not looking backwards. It is remembrance, carrying emotional depth into the present where memory participates in shaping beauty and grants time its meaning.

And in our embrace of nostalgia as a refined aesthetic form, we must also fully inhabit the present, nourishing the balance between wonder and the extraordinary, so that memories of the future are built upon the very same beauty we live today, which we will one day preserve in memory.

MARINA FEDOROVA