When art becomes a way of self-expression, an artist sooner or later runs into a language problem – visual forms may seem too general to convey something very specific which is manifested here and now. All the more if this visuality is abstract, a viewer has every right to put their own meanings in author's private words. In her project Between Strokes, a painter Anna Mironova shows an ambiguous attitude towards the issue of interpretation: the field of her own art becomes so dense and saturated that there is no room left for someone else's point of view, yet the author does not reject that such may exist. Thus, the title itself is more like a question rather than a statement.
With this in mind, Between Strokes may become sort of a test for a viewer: can they overcome their desire to be present in the artist's works, demonstrate true empathy in order to see what Anna Mironova put in her works? As there are supposed to be neither codes nor plot mysteries in the series – only strong feelings of the present time and space, the atmosphere the painter found herself in at one time or another. Even the form cannot help in examination: Mironova intentionally uses only simple means (a pencil and paper) in the visual art and, by doing so, refuses from overburdening with external decoration. That is a viewer is left with only one variant of communication with the author's art – delve into what is hidden between the compositions made of simple strokes.
At the same time, Anna Mironova's exhibition is not monotonous at all. Through her “pure" graphic technique, the painter elaborates the works that are widely different by their emotional filling: the scattered noise intensity of some works is in contrast with the rhythmicity and linearity of other non-figurative images. Such dynamic creative interaction is achieved owing to the arrangement in the exposition of different series of the works created from 2015 to 2017. The titles of the cycles themselves imply the common nature of the ideas: Between Strokes, Border, Horizontals and Black Sign. All of them speak in the language of space, connecting the author's personality with the plane she interacts with.
Hence, sometimes there may be even an artist themself hidden between the strokes – in the smallest minutiae, imperceptible hollows, white spots. It is not for nothing that the personality is searched in its absence and the works of unknown artists are attributed by the technique that the “unimportant" details are made with, such as nails and earlobes – with the only purpose of comprehending a painting through something not easily observed. And don't Mironova's words “In my works the strokes are so dense that it is no use looking in between them for something opposite to the feelings I was experiencing at the time" confirm the thought that it is the chinks between the strokes that make it possible for us to see the emotion captured in the strokes themselves?
Polina Limina