Untitled 2022

This untitled piece is from a sketchbook by Alevtyna Kakhidze, using simple black ink and a little color on paper. The marks are so direct, almost like automatic writing. And what I mean by that is, you can almost feel the artist thinking through the pen. I find myself drawn to the figure on the right-hand page. It is literally an outline, a shell. The heavy ink of the mittened hands and feet anchors the figure, but the blank interior allows your eye to see right through it. The figure stands next to a bubble of text, floating in the air with a question, and so it seems like it’s asking us, where do we get our substance from? What fills us up? Kakhidze’s work reminds me of artists like Philip Guston, who also embraced a kind of raw, immediate approach to image-making. It’s like they are both unafraid to let their thoughts take shape right in front of us. Both artists embrace the open-endedness that art offers.