In the Eye of Beauty
26 November 2021 – 5 February 2022
For Aks Misyuta, painting is a mass, a bluish block from which figures emerge. Her works produce on us the effect of an Atlantis. An era seems to have evaded us with its codes, rites, objects and images.
In large formats, simple scenes unfold and saturate the space. Bodies are cut out and marked like high reliefs. The painting becomes architectural. The characters are transformed into classical statues with disturbing details. The titles refer, most often, to simple and daily actions, but Aks Misyuta figures a suspended moment totally monumentalized. Her attention makes the features deepen, and the muscles swell. The banality is filled with a pre-historic time. A time that empties each wristwatch.
Aks Misyuta fascinates by the extreme lucidity she shows of the constant struggle that makes the artist the guarantor of the survival of their own narrative. To be a painter is inevitably to speak to the past while projecting images into the future. The watches she represents are empty, but the bodies are amplified by a disturbing perception of themselves.
Aks Misyuta, Madonna With Fruits, 2021
If we think we can distinguish motifs from art history, those are modulated from within. The deformation of the subjects’ limbs can be understood as the representation of physical memories of certain situations. The artist seems to try to fix and magnify the sensitive memory of our bodies. Thus, if we follow the track given by the title of some of her works, we can say that we all know these simple and heavy feelings. Aks Misyuta knows that art is essentially a moment of embodied perception.
This body, a fragment of perception, is also the subject of the series of small bronze sculptures. This series of small sketches holds a tiny monumentality, like the one we feel when we listen to our weaknesses and our sorrows.
Aks Misyuta, Euphoria, 2021
Thus, we all know the feeling of occupying a body that nothing could dress adequately. We overcome with difficulty the fatigue, this necessary but brutal enemy. We would like to perceive the festive and joyful background of motherhood. We all try one day or the other to extract ourselves energetically from the mass of our fellow human beings. In short, our bodies have kept the memory of being that baby playing with knives.
The buried continent that Aks Misyuta reveals is ours in all its beauty, tensions and rigidities. But without fear, the artist also lets it be known that we are masters of our memory’s color. The spaces exist to transcend our common destiny.
Samuel Gross