Artist Statement — LOLA ALIMOVA

I work between painting and drawing, and I try to keep anyone — including myself — from being sure which is which.

I also work in film direction, and that background feeds directly into how I think about images. Film has made me attentive to framing, rhythm, scale, and the way an image reveals itself over time. In my visual art practice, those concerns become less narrative and more physical: they appear in the way a composition is cropped, how a line directs the eye, or how an image seems to emerge, disappear, and return within the surface.

An oil pastel piece grows to 30 by 40 inches, soft and dense, until it has the weight of a painting. An oil painting shrinks down, thins out, and starts acting like a quick note. What interests me is the moment a viewer's certainty breaks: when a sketch turns out to hold the wall like a painting, and a painting turns out to think like a drawing.

The line is the most honest mark I know. It can't fake anything. A scrawl, a loop, a scribble that buries itself — that's a hand moving in real time, before judgment kicks in. Sometimes I leave those marks exposed. Sometimes I cover them with color and let them fight their way back through. A lot of my process is that push and pull between erasing and asserting: what gets buried, what survives, what refuses to disappear.

I started out as a representational artist, and I've never fully walked away from it. Every so often I go back to the figure, to the recognizable world — not the academic way they did it in the nineteenth century, but as something contemporary: a form half-surfacing out of abstraction, an image allowed to exist only as much as it needs to. My early work was more openly representational, and that's still underneath everything I make. Even my most abstract surfaces carry the memory of an image — a silhouette in the dark, a face dissolving into line. For me, abstraction isn't a rejection of the image. It's a way of holding it at arm's length.

I was born in Tashkent in 2001. I grew up between the graphic and the painted, and I stopped believing there's a border between them. Medium, to me, isn't a material — it's a behavior. A drawing is whatever thinks like one. A painting is whatever takes up space like one. Most of my work does both at once. That doubleness — provisional and final, intimate and monumental — is what I'm after.