Paintings
This section presents a curated selection of paintings created throughout Victoria Dael’s artistic journey since 2016 — from the early series shaped by cultural memory to her recent lyrical works inspired by the light and landscapes of Andalusia.
Victoria’s earlier paintings often reflected her interest in history, classical heritage, and the fragile continuity between past and present. Series such as Time of Witnesses, We Were Here, and Terracotta Frescoes explored the visual language of ancient cultures, the echoes of lost civilizations, and the palimpsest-like nature of memory.
After relocating to Spain in 2022, Victoria’s artistic voice opened toward a more atmospheric and poetic expression. Living in Riogordo, surrounded by olive groves, hills, and shifting skies, she began to work with a brighter palette, transparent layers of color, and subtle emotional states. Her recent works capture warmth, tenderness, the rhythm of everyday light, and the quiet beauty of Andalusian landscapes.
Here you will find paintings created in Ukraine and Spain — works born from different places, epochs of her life, and inner transformations. Together they form a continuous line of exploration: of color, memory, and the emotional depth of the world around us.
Autumn in Riogordo
This series captures the warm, sunlit calm of autumn in Riogordo, a season when the hills turn copper, the olive trees grow heavy, and the village glows with soft afternoon light. Painted with acrylic on toned paper and accented with colored marker, these works blend loose expressive shapes with clean, deliberate lines.
The Andalusian landscape appears in short, rhythmic strokes: winding roads, terracotta rooftops, distant mountains, orchards, and fields traced with autumn patterns. Each piece preserves a fleeting moment of the season, a quiet walk, a warm breeze, the familiar geometry of the village seen through fall colors.
Together, they form a gentle, quietly personal portrait
of Riogordo in its most golden time of year
Time of Witnesses
These paintings were created in 2016, shaped by the shock and sorrow of watching news about the destruction of Aleppo, a city that, like so many cultural centers before it, became a witness to how history can crumble into dust before our eyes. Out of this sense of fragility and endurance arose a series about memory that survives wars, violence, and time itself.
In Time of Witnesses, classical figures from Antiquity and the Renaissance enter contemporary space. Fragments of sculpture, ancient profiles, and Renaissance faces appear on layered painterly surfaces, like palimpsests where each stratum preserves a trace of its era. Color, texture, and relief create the sense of time moving not in a straight line, but in overlapping waves.
These ancient heroes continue to exist among us, not as museum artifacts, but as living presences carried into a new world. They are given a second life, altered by paint, shaped by modern gestures, dissolving into abstract fields of color and emerging again through them. Their silence is not an absence of voice, but a profound testimony to millennia of human culture.
The faces of Greek gods, philosophers, Renaissance women, and youthful singers intertwine with hints of landscape, architecture, earth, and light, like ruins reappearing in a changed landscape. Each painting suggests that the past never disappears. Through small fragments, we can feel the whole and sense the breath of an era.
Time of Witnesses is a series about memory that cannot be erased. About the dialogue between eras, in which ancient faces regain their presence in the now. About culture that endures destruction and war, yet always returns, in new forms, new layers, a new life.
Layers of Memory
These works were born in the quiet winters of Lviv. When figures stopped speaking to me, I began listening to the walls, their cracks, their crumbling plaster, the faded paint, the breath of time hidden between the layers. I learned to read the city like a palimpsest: first the white lime, beneath it the sand, beneath the sand someone’s hand, beneath the hand a story no one remembers anymore.
I gathered anything that could hold a trace: bits of fabric, torn cardboard, grains, dried grasses, the dust of old streets. Sometimes it felt as if I was collecting fragments of someone’s days rather than materials. The layers settled slowly, like winter snow on stone roofs. I pressed, scraped, added, removed, and beneath the white appeared warm sand, beneath the sand the shadow of charcoal, beneath the charcoal another forgotten tale.
These paintings do not depict the world. They remember it. In whispers. In dry, fragile edges of paper. In the warmth of straw caught between layers. In quiet gold, like morning light on a cold wall.
When I brought them to Los Angeles for The Other Art Fair, they felt like letters from another time.
Pieces of an old city carried into the noise of a modern one. Their cracks and textures spoke even louder there, a reminder that memory always lives in surfaces, and time leaves its marks on us just as it does on the walls of old houses.
This series is about what remains. About what is hidden but still rises through. About the quiet stories that materials tell better than images ever could. About the layers through which the past can still be heard.
Parisian Stories
This series emerged in 2016 from a desire to bring onto canvas the light, crisp, almost airy Parisian vibe that had long lived in sketches, memories, books, and films. Here, Paris is not a documentary city but a collective image shaped from countless stories we grow up with. A city that arrives from the pages of novels, from cinema screens, from history books, and from the tales of travelers.
Fragments of memory and culture intertwine as freely as lines and color fields on the canvas: Hemingway in a small café, Esmeralda on a corner square, Ravic on a bridge, little boys in shorts, a girl with a fresh baguette, cyclists, sailors, old men resting in the Tuileries, a clochard with wine, porters on the Seine’s embankment. They are all inhabitants of a vast imagined Paris, the Paris that lives inside each of us.
These works are not about documenting the city.
They capture a mood, a lightness, the breath of a place.
Sketches, outlines, archival fragments, old letters, postal stamps, street names, scraps of newspapers, delicate pencil lines, and layered textures come together as a palimpsest, as if the city had been written and rewritten on the canvas over many years. Different eras overlap: the Paris of the 19th century, the Paris of the 1930s, the Paris of today.
Familiar silhouettes of rooftops, chimneys, narrow Montmartre stairways, old signs, quays, and attic windows evoke the feeling of wandering through a city that has long become an inner landscape. People say that modern Paris is no longer the same, too fast, too new. But in these paintings, it remains what it has always been: complex, multifaceted, tender, slightly nostalgic.
Paris in this series is a mirror.
Everyone sees their own reflection in it.
“Parisian Stories” is a personal encounter with a city that resonates with the heart, an attempt to preserve the fragile feeling that arises when Paris reveals itself fully, simply because we are open to it.
