Images inhabit a different time from our own.

Some seem to travel across centuries without losing their presence. Others wait for years before revealing themselves. They belong neither entirely to the past nor entirely to the present, but to that rare moment when someone truly begins to look at them again.

It is within this space that Abstention takes shape.

For Nino Kapanadze, painting begins long before the first brushstroke. It begins in the silence of the studio, in the preparation of the canvas, and in the decision to slow time down enough for images to emerge before they are claimed by history, memory, or the urgency of the present.

The studio is a space of abstention. Not a refuge from the world, but the place where its noise subsides just enough for another experience of time to become possible. It is here that a genuine “state of attention” arises—not a state of concentration, but a way of looking that relinquishes control and allows the image to unfold in its own time.

This state gave rise to the exhibition.

During a visit to the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome, a number of ancient sculptural fragments caught the artist’s attention with unexpected intensity. It was not their identity that drew her in. It was their presence. She photographed them without knowing why. Weeks later, back in her studio, she decided to work from some of those images, imposing one simple yet radical rule upon herself.

“I decided not to know who they were.”

No research. No labels. Only looking.

Only after the paintings had already begun did she discover that she had chosen Nero and Agrippina¹.

History enters the painting only afterwards.

Perhaps this is the key to Kapanadze’s practice. Painting does not confirm knowledge already possessed; it creates the conditions in which something may finally reveal itself.

Meaning follows.

The same principle shapes the material life of the paintings.

Long before the first gesture, the artist prepares the canvas using rabbit-skin glue and calcium carbonate. The preparation is not an invisible support but the first layer of the image itself. Its whiteness, its absorbency and its texture remain active throughout the entire painting process.

In the three works that open the exhibition—In Absentia #1, Capite velato, and In Absentia #3—this principle becomes especially evident. Forms emerge through delicate veils of zinc white and titanium white, while what we perceive as shadow is often nothing more than the prepared ground itself.

“Everything you perceive as a shadow is in fact white of the canvas, absence of the oil paint.”

Painting constructs the image precisely through what it chooses not to paint.

Absence becomes matter.

Emptiness generates presence.

Born in Georgia in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as Georgia regained its independence, Kapanadze knows intimately the weight of history. Yet her paintings refrain from representing historical events directly. Not out of indifference, nor from a desire to escape the present. On the contrary. By creating distance, they recover the possibility of seeing the world differently.

In a time marked by the relentless production of images, their rapid consumption, and the constant demand for immediate responses, Abstention proposes a radically simple gesture:

to slow down.

To allow an image to exist before its meaning.

Pheraps this is what Nino Kapanadze’s painting continues to seek.

Perhaps what her painting seeks is light itself—the invisible condition that allows every image to emerge. White is not absence but the quiet sum of all colours, a space of infinite possibility.

Landscape becomes a witness, a field where history is lived, erased and continually rewritten. Looking back, we ask in astonishment: was it really there?

Painting cannot restore what has vanished. It can only bring us to that rare moment when something becomes intensely present once again.

 

¹ The sculptural fragments chosen by Nino Kapanadze depict Nero (AD 37–68) and his mother Agrippina the Younger (AD 15–59), two central figures in the history of the Roman Empire. Agrippina secured her son’s accession to the imperial throne, while Nero would later become one of antiquity’s most controversial rulers. According to ancient sources, he ordered his mother’s assassination in AD 59. After his death, the Roman Senate declared him a public enemy and condemned him in absentia. The connection between these historical figures and the title of the series revealed itself only afterwards, once the artist had already selected and begun painting the images.