Stefania Batoeva: Promises, promises

This new series of paintings was made over the past months since the artist’s relocation to Paris. The large-scale oil canvases presented in Promises, promises continue to drift between abstraction and figuration. A code of styles is deployed 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.

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. Are we as material beings tossed and turned by hidden specters of emotion and intention. Alone in a bedroom with him. A heavy blanket-sky of expectation. A gentle untangle of the hair by an immaterial hand that both comforts and unsettles.

Stefania Batoeva (b. 1981 Sofia, Bulgaria) lives and works in Paris. Selected exhibitions include: Divorce, Public Gallery, London (2022, solo); Something to me, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2021, solo); Le Marteau sans maître, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2021, solo); Le Coeur Encore, The Approach, London (2021, group); Drama, Import Export, Warsaw (2021) with SAGG Napoli; Marc Chagall, All Welcome, London (2019, solo); Devoted Iota Elusion, Emalin, London (2017, solo); Total Devotion, Almanac, Turin (2017, solo); Winterheart, Ermes-Ermes, Vienna (2017, solo).