This body of work, shaped by distance and displacement, reveals the fluidity of the self and the opacity of the memory the body keeps.
Being physically far from home, I feel the spiritual confusion of neither having fully left, nor having fully arrived. In the totality of this liminal existence my painting practice keeps me present, while my body is inhabited by ghosts of past memories it has carried within it across the Atlantic and to the other hemisphere.
I wonder what my voice sounds like, suspended in this ongoing state of in-betweenness by the comfort and violence of distance. Geographical distance of 4626 miles (bird fly) between me and my family, multiplied by the temporal, multiplied by the emotional. Freedom and fractured belonging. The physical act of painting is a conversation, beginning not from the roots, but from the rupture. The body engages with the canvas, it responds, resists, yields. I listen to what it needs, I hide and reveal. I make marks so present you can’t not see them, make color vibrations so subtle they are barely there, make the surface itself forget the marks it carries. Ungraspable instants and fragments appear, dissolve, and reorganize themselves on the surface of the painting. They look like they remind you of something, as if you were about to remember your dream, but refuse to resolve.
Transience is a distant, ambient sound that surrounds me and haunts my body. I don’t notice the background noise here anymore. I’m not sure I remember what home sounded like. But the moment I thought I’d completely lost it, the ghosts flooded my images. I concentrate and I’m present, but the paintings are haunted anyway - by the Minsk concrete heavy air, glowing Metro signs, riverside shelters for the soul smelling like pine and thyme, the annoying sound of the neighbor’s kid sliding the horsehair bow across the metal strings, me being the kid playing the violin annoying the neighbor, the endless train sounds, all kinds of endless sounds and sensations my body contains in its memory.
The language of paint is elliptical, rhythmic, and sometimes contradictory, echoing the pulse-like consciousness of Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva. I privilege sensation, vibration, and rhythm over description or representation. Fragmentation is my ontology: identity, memory, and experience are not stable things, they are ongoing processes.
My paintings have become an event of contact, a moment in which the world touches the body and the body answers back. They ask to be encountered rather than decoded, to be felt rather than grasped. In their opacity, they enact the fluidity, displacement, and indeterminacy that shape human existence. The texts that appear alongside the paintings work as extensions of the paintings’ logic: parallel gestures in language that move between transparency and opacity, between the desire to be unseen and the impossibility of erasing the body that remembers.