Specie di spazi
Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by artist Evgeniya Pankratova, curated by Milena Zanetti. The exhibition, titled Specie di spazi (Species of Spaces), brings together a series of paintings and sculptures created specifically for this occasion.
The exhibition’s title, intentionally taken from George Perec’s book of the same name, refers to the “bestiary of spaces” that the author compiled while writing his essay. Pankratova has, in fact, portrayed a series of small artificial environments in which fabrics, figures, plants, and other elements interact with each other.
Spaces without a specific function, which first take shape as painted and decorated cardboard models, into which the artist places her own pawns and their objects, almost as a game. It is the environment itself that becomes the protagonist, as the only witness to the gestures, habits, and rituals that define the individual within that space. In an age when things are gradually being replaced by information—thereby diminishing our attention span—highlighting space and the objects that animate it means restoring a different kind of temporality: one that is slower and more contemplative.
It is exactly in this suspended dimension that Pankratova’s paintings are set: intimate spaces in which light and shadow cut through the scene like spotlights, lending it a theatrical and dramatic tone, while, on the other hand, the drapery softens the atmosphere. Among the stars in the sky, the artist’s hands also appear, as if to govern the fates of the characters who inhabit these spaces.
Yet, even in their stillness, a sense of desolation remains, a subtle unease that seems to suspend everything and transport the viewer to a different, slower time, in which observing also means inhabiting the space. The objects, the architecture, and the figures that populate them thus seem to belong to a distant era in which tangible things reclaim their power and their magic.
The artist gives us the opportunity to contemplate—without any second thoughts—silent, ordinary, and unassuming things, and to listen to them. In these spaces, everyday objects are temporarily free from their daily functions, opening up the possibility of an unusual experience of attention, in which even the simplest objects can be perceived in a different way.