Yana Grozavu - The Duality of Women Dancing in the Night

Written by Sophie Marx

Photography by Réana Zenaf

A woman is standing behind the bar, pouring a drink, lost in the scene playing out before her. With graceful movements, a dancer is spinning her body around a pole, her muscles pulling her up, only to glide down in a spiraling movement, as one arm and leg are tightly wrapped around the metal. In that moment, the onlooker behind the bar morphed into the dancer, becoming her, lost in the movements as the audience blended into darkness. It was a dream-like sequence, particles of flashbacks forging their way into the presence of another life.

Years later, the pole dancer emerged from the brushstrokes that had previously captured her essence in a painting, and it was not the only one coming alive. The colours from all the paintings positioned around the room began transcending out of the canvases as the scenes were mirrored on the dance floor.

At her soirée in Le Rouge, Yana Grozavu had achieved what she had intended to do, as her nightlife scenes captured between Paris and Miami were not only reflected but lived in the night of her exhibition. Born to Romanian parents in the suburbs of Paris, Yana’s creativity was fostered from an early age. After completing secondary school, she decided to venture out on her own into the heart of the city, pursuing an art degree while keeping herself financially afloat with jobs at bars and clubs. Working as a bartender in the strip club Pink Paradise, she quickly became captivated with capturing the beauty she found herself surrounded by. From the colours, to the way the light fell onto the women’s faces and bodies, she wanted to record it all the way she saw it: as sensual and beautiful.

Her style of portraying women is distinct in their uniform look of long dark hair, and, if the face is visible, their full lips, straight nose, and exaggerated eyelashes. Yana explained to me, as we were sitting on the floor of her studio surrounded by her paintings, that “the women kind of look like me because I paint what I know and what I see. I am my own muse, but it’s not a self-portrait. While I am them, they are not me.”

Photography provided by Yana Grozavu [Estampe - Sultana]

Painting the bodies nude, she is not concerned with painting the female or occasionally the male body for the body’s sake. Instead, she elaborated that they don’t wear any clothes because they have nothing to do with the scenes, as clothes are only temporary. In her paintings, the colours she prescribes the body, from red, orange, yellow, purple, or green, become the abstracting and protective garments while symbolising the emotional state the people are in.

The women are the focal point of the canvas and stick out through the composition. Incorporating dream-like components into her observations, absolving them from notions of reality and her own experiences, the images are a product of her imagination. We never see a complete face, body and background together. At least one aspect is always distorted through melting lines or missing limbs and features.

In the same way, she is utilising colour in the dream-sphere, she also plays with proportions to translate what she is observing onto the canvas. In Pornstar Martini, a red-coloured woman is standing in the shadow behind the bar. In front of her, three cocktails are placed with women posing inside of the glasses. In Sultana, a smoking woman is sitting next to a woman dancing on a pole. Their proportions are flawed, an indicator of the dream-state, as the smoking woman is drawn to look larger despite sitting behind the dancer, as if she were watching her. Through the proportions, we can assume that she is not physically present but potentially showed herself in the flashback of the scene. The dancer’s head is thrown back, and, in the place her face would be, a large mask-like face is hovering over her. Both left arms of the women are missing, and the dancer is one of the only women drawn by the artist dressed in light clothes.

“Strip clubs are not just about dancing, and everyone knows that. You can see this creepy face in the background of the Sultana painting making it very ambiguous because you see this beautiful woman and the dancer, and then you have this creepy face making everything awkward.”

Distorting proportions or, as in Une Danse, placing black silhouettes as the audience behind the dancer, the artist brings attention to a different side of the nightlife. The intense reds and oranges, in combination with the face hovering over the dancer, lend an aggressive atmosphere to the scene similar to Une Danse. Using darker, more structured reds in combination with the spotlight on the faceless, moving dancer and the audience lingering in a black spotted background creates an impression of the surroundings slowly consuming the dancer.

While it was the beauty she witnessed in these establishments that drew her in, she felt that she also had to acknowledge the other, darker side—the purchasing of women’s bodies and the emotional turmoil the nightlife can cause. In her most recent paintings, Sans Nom, La Sieste (The Nap), and Al Rummān, she builds on the negative aspects and the melancholy and isolation arising from life at night;

Photography provided by Yana Grozavu [Sans Nom - La Sieste - Al Rummān]

“I thought it was interesting to put these paintings in this festive, party background of the exhibition because these three were very different and didn’t fit. They show the vice and fragility of this life and this career and the relationships and loneliness of the women. When you work in the nightlife, your life is very different from others because you are on a very different schedule.”

The paintings symbolise taking a step back from the party, a reflection of the interior life of the women. In La Sieste, the melancholic ambiguity stems from the uncertainty of whether the woman resting her head on the green spectral woman’s lap is asleep or dead. Her skin is coloured in a macabre purple shade resembling dead skin. Yana explained: “I wanted to put a bit of melancholy, reality, and depth into the imagery of the party, showing that it goes beyond drinking and having fun.”

A haunting sadness is also portrayed through red colour fading into a pinkish grey of both the cowering woman and the background surrounding her in Sans Nom. The contrast of intense reds with fading tones used in the love scene Al Rummān, between a woman and man facing each other, reveals detachment.

The women and men portrayed are the same people, their recurrence linking the individual paintings into an odyssey of the nightlife observed from behind the bar. The story told does not only consist of snapshots of the party life but reflects in its motives the growth Yana herself went through. Whether it was the shifting of observations she captured that helped her discover who she is, not only as an artist but as a person, or whether it was the reverse, and who she found turning inwards shifted her perspective—the soirée marked an end of a chapter for her as an artist.

“I used to think that what people think about you is important because, without them, it’s as if you don’t exist. How you project yourself and how they perceive you is how you exist in real life. If people can’t see me, then I don’t exist.”

Now Yana reflects on her experiences, stating, “I didn’t find myself in the nightlife, but it was a part of my journey.” And it is, per se, this journey—a story between fiction, dreams, and herself—that is reflected in her nightlife series.