Mariam Inashvili’s paintings insinuate structural collapse. Their definitions have fallen through, folded in on themselves to create a morphed collage of presence and absences within the blank space. The edge of the paper is not the limit, but the lines that impress themselves upon it, are. They constitute a transmuted event.
Shapes emerge from left to right as corporeal extensions, tracing the thin lines of a surface. Implying that options are often boiled down to dualities. The space is filled with repetition, but not a single utterance is entirely the same. Languid, wrought, the sentences drift across the paper, attempting to look through it. From up there, the structure of the compressed fiber appears blurred; no longer bleached sheets of deconstructed wood, but a means to an end.
The letter’s gaze narrows from above, only reading what it needs. The letters trace the paper’s lines for as long as they can until the structure that once guided them breaks apart. Dented, the concave words can no longer emit what they were designated to. A stunted word lies flat, scanning the paper membrane separating it from the outside. There’s nothing. Markings show meticulous observation that is inhabited by dormant potentials.
Inashvili’s work is a remedy for collective inertia, for dormancy. Particles, specks, dust, are events. Patterns appear around the base, woven into gullible sentences. The stilted language. Letters are exchanged one by one, words become redundant. The dimpled lines expose the inability of words, how ill-equipped they are in the face of dominance, how they imply, yet fail. Or, what happened to the notion of shaping the present, to the assumption that things belong. In the presence of an overabundance of logical strain, abstraction emerges. A refusal to conquer the image or the word in the space they hold.
– Aske Hyldborg Jensen
Photo: Mareike Tocha