Public Gallery, London
Stefania Batoeva
Public Gallery is pleased to introduce a solo presentation of new paintings by Paris based artist Stefania Batoeva. This is the gallery’s second solo project with Batoeva, whose first solo exhibition with Public was in November 2022. Drifting between abstraction and figuration, Batoeva’s paintings deploy a code of styles to reveal an inner world infused with autobiographical events and fictions. Ranging from insistent expressivity to tender layering, together the works shape a broader, non-linear tale of intimacy and its failures.
Predominantly working on a large-scale the individual compositions travel through the works, carried over by shared threads and symbols. Like the artist’s image echoing in the figurative, sometimes merged with others in her life. Or by subjectively charged fragments of landscape recurring within the abstract to assist in seeing this internal correspondence. Divisions and structural fields in the framing allude to a differentiation of worlds – real and not, a visual representation of invisible influences. The subjects are both alone and not, affected by a presence. Batoeva returns continually to the question of touch and to affect without it. Figures appear in flux, and yet is there a shared reality between them. This affect touch seems to bridge ontologies and states of consciousness, it is here where we find the possible and the visceral, it is here where we live and meet, open, fuzzy, suspended in extension.