Dymchuk Gallery presents the project Indifferent Space, which includes paintings, graphics, and video by Natalia Lisova, created after a full-scale invasion in the format of a series of landscapes and interiors. Black and white smoky canvases are a form that allows the artist to capture space and fresh memories, as if from a long-gone peaceful life before bitter adulthood and war. Due to the fear of loss, the author began to preserve important places and people, creating a niche of memories in which one can safely immerse oneself.
Lisova’s black-and-white interiors look disturbing and forsaken, but instead, the landscapes seem to create portals to an uncertain and safe world. Such achromatic fixation ensures the preservation of the self-sufficiency of the memory, capturing the past in an artistic frame. It is the author’s way of stabilizing, archiving, and preserving space, present and future. At the same time, this method also works for archiving memory, which, with time, loses details and documentation, becomes less reliable, changeable, and later, in general, leaves one impression that it’s no longer so important whether it was this way exactly.
It’s as if the artist deliberately washes away the details of a fresh memory to a state that has long since passed as if it were impossible to lose more. Only the main thing remained, which is difficult to see behind the nebula of time. Most people today, on the contrary, create thousands of photographs in the hope of somehow capturing time and reality but rarely return to them.
Erasure method. The artist produces the picture clearly and in detail, and then, depending on the technique, she erases the created image with brushes, a rag, or her hands. Using this method, the author doesn’t need to be realistic to be sincere, but it’s necessary to be sincere internally without going into details.
Due to the pain and losses of the war, the perception of space became emotionally charged, and the perception of the landscape became more difficult. From now on, it’s difficult to contemplate the landscape and not to think what war experience has received this land. Where is this area now? Is it occupied? Has it suffered from shelling? Does it give shelter to our defenders? Due to her strong attachment to Ukrainian space, the author cannot live abroad. Interaction with one’s own space has become a daily need because this space is stable, whole, and gives hope.
Natalia Lisova
She was born in Lytin, Vinnytsia region.
In 2011, she graduated from the Vinnytsia Faculty of the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts, majoring in Environmental Design.
In 2018, a GaudePolonia scholarship holder from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland, curator Janusz Baldyga (Poznan, Poland).
In 2019, she graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, majoring in Theory and History of Art (Kyiv).
In 2021, she was co-curator of the MYTHOGENESIS International Landscape Art Festival (Vinnytsia).
From 2021, PhD candidate, NAOMA (Kyiv).
Lives and works in Kyiv.