«Margarita’s plastic drama appears as a deeply internal theater wherein the symbols of the past and present reflect the mystery of the artist’s very personal myth and where at the same time her personality, immersed as it is in visionary evidence, is deeply rooted in the collective subconscious while the crown is reaching beyond the empirically perceivable reality.

The artist’s characters move through entire cultural history as glimmering memories of the past. Their images return to modern painting the mysterious luminescence of Rembrandt’s work and the interiors of Vermeer, and the energy of their spaces overturns into our world like the tense multi-layered quality of Francis Bacon’s work. Margarita came to the art world from illustration and the book tradition creates a special tension in artist’s plastic world, transforming its imagery into a wonderfully organic of an enigmatic fusion of cultural memory and intuition. It is precisely in this unity of meaning and imagery that the archetypes of the text and sign meet, bringing together Borges and Pavic, and French post-Structuralists. It is here that one can re-live the ancient myth about the world as a Book, in whose labyrinths we all dwell.

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The ideas and imagery, existing in the space of the Book, circulate as units of one and the same eternal structure, constantly generating and constructing the basic mythologemes of our reality. It opens like a symbolic parachute, returns lost time in the image of a floating Ark in the work "Memory", its forms become living plasma, spiritualized elements in the work "Gone with the Wind".

Carrying elements of traditional Luna-park entertainments and the symbolism of mass culture a series of shooting range targets creates images reminding us of the flimsy borderlines between play and terror, of the possibilities of the catastrophes lurking within ordinary reality. Those signs-symbols acquire a strange new life, quite unrelated to the artist’s intentions, they prolong their existence even beyond the life of the artifact, creating a reverberation of meanings and resonances.

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Margarita mythologizes life itself, infusing its rational manifestations with profound reflections evolving into postmodern metaphysics. This is the position of the seeker of the signs of time, where the sacred shines through the concreteness of today's realities, revealing the eternal themes of the relationship of spirit and matter, freedom and unfreedom.

A divine chance, a rhythmically breathing space “compressed to the point of a dot”, to quote the poet Osip Mandelstam, the corporeal liberated of its materiality and prolonged in the purity of the artistic gesture as such, the artist’s gesture itself behind the spaciousness of the painting texture, its matrix as it were, which gives birth to a wholesome and harmonious human image – these constitute the dramaturgy of the birth of the works of Margarita Godgelf.»

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Vitaly Patsukov, art critic, curator, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Arts