Ania Khazina

The world needs to slow down,— says Ania Khazina, a 29 y.o., Russian-born Parisian is presenting her fist series of paintings she’s been working on between 2022 and 2024.

Nine large-scale paintings are mostly portraits, little scenes that we cannot grasp. Situated in an anonymous space — a city, a bar, a backseat of a car — making them easily relatable and often show people in-between moments, rarely showing the eyes of the protagonists. These individuals often turn their gaze away, not just from the viewer but also from something significant, such as the sun, a concert, or a speaker. Sometimes, their focus is on something within them rather than outside the canvas. The composition and the contrast of fluorescent greens, blues and yellows with dark red, black and purple convey a sense of unease, akin to Munch-like angst and Hopperian alienation. It’s a span of a second full of deep and true ambivalence.

These scenes never explain anything to us, they unfold on a periphery of a story. That’s exactly the point of the series: to show something which cannot be seen as important in a culture where taking up space is a necessary part of everyday struggle for being someone and proving something. These scenes are not instagrammable and too intricate to be explained — they are in-between the climax and the end of story, out of the narrative. Is it a breakup or just a two people with complicated emotions towards each other? No one is a winner and everyone is trapped in their vulnerability. The viewer and the artist here is a voyeur, penetrating into the lonely intimacy of the characters.

A deliberate choice of large-scale format that allows the artists to show the characters on the human scale and share their sadness as if they were present. Acrylic paint enables to add volume and to rework the painting extensively, adding as many more layers to the paintings (ang therefore, to the “story”). The lines are blurred and the painting leeks and lives its own life — adding the memory-like, the “seen from the car window on a rainy day” quality to the artworks.

While being present herself in the couple of her artworks, Ania doesn’t deny that although none of the works are painted from life, they are inspired by some life events and micro scenes that she observed and experienced. “I like this idea of being a cameo in your own life. You can be having fun at the party and the next minute you can just switch off your energy and become an observer, without actively participating in a situation. It’s also about being a woman: can you be powerful but not the loudest person in the room and have some sort of… soft power”.

Born from the artist’s unique experience of being a foreigner in Europe, observing a tragedy of war through the phone screen and going through personal relationships and life choices, they create a space of shared fragility, where every picture is a mirror.

- Alexandra Khazina.