The Language of Seeing
Aliona MuravskajaAlyona Artme
For a long time, my artistic hand was silent.
Not because I had ceased to be an artist, but because that same hand had become occupied with building a studio, creating a business, curating exhibitions, leading projects, and responding to the practical demands of everyday life. Painting gradually gave way to responsibility.
The desire to create never disappeared.
It simply became quiet.
Then, almost unexpectedly, my hand remembered.
Looking back, I no longer believe that this return began with a painting.
It began with conversation.
Meeting Nikolay Zapolnov and Andrej Denisenko marked the beginning of that return. His openness to experimentation and his confidence in artistic intuition created the conditions in which painting became possible again. I returned to the studio, completed one unfinished work, and then another.
Only afterwards did I begin to understand what had changed.
Every artist sees differently.
Not only the world, but colour.
Space.
Silence.
Light.
To spend time among artists is to enter many visual languages at once.
At first, I simply observed.
Gradually, I began to recognize recurring gestures, recurring choices, recurring ways of constructing meaning.
Only much later did I notice that some of those ways of seeing had quietly become part of my own.
This series emerged from that process.
Conversations with Jevgenij Dranik altered my sensitivity to the dialogue between black and blue and to the relationship between what exists above and what unfolds below.
Time spent in Valamo transformed my understanding of colour. Watching an illustrator balance black with blue, soft pink, and warm beige revealed that black could hold stillness as naturally as light.
Working alongside Viktoria Dragon renewed my attention to movement and material, while the discipline of iconography introduced another visual language—one shaped by gesture, stillness, and presence. Within these paintings, that presence appears not as a traditional sacred figure, but as a guardian of the forest: a quiet force that protects rather than commands.
Encountering Master Victor’s philosophy of Deep Positivism revealed another possibility—that light may function not only as a visual phenomenon, but also as an ethical one.
Looking back now, I understand that the paintings were never waiting for more time.
They were waiting for another way of seeing.
Perhaps this is what AWAKENING has come to mean for me.
Not the discovery of a new artistic identity,
but the recognition of one that had been quietly forming through every conversation, every shared experience, and every artist who changed the way I looked at the world.
When I walk through this exhibition, I do not simply encounter individual works.
I encounter a network of conversations.
Every painting carries traces of those encounters—not as quotations or references, but as ways of seeing absorbed, transformed, and made unmistakably my own.
- SIZE
- 80,4 x 100 cm + framing 4 cm
- FRAMING
- FRAMED
- SERIES
- Cobalt 1/3
- MEDIUM
- Canvas
- TECHNIQUE
- Oil
- LOCATION
- Espoo, Finland
- YEAR
- 2026
- PRICE
- 770.00 €