Artist Statement — LOLA ALIMOVA

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

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.