Nina Kintsurashvili
In creating the paintings for Seams, the New York-based artist began with a painting defined by electric mint-hued fragments, overlaying a deeper green approaching midnight. Along the canvas’s right edge, the image splits into a sliver of pale, foggy light, like the edge of a photograph. The light carries into the next painting, an oxblood-red one, as a cream margin that won’t stay put, leaking onto a second canvas that is now the other half of a diptych. That margin then becomes a buttery yellow and runs into another diptych. Here, half-erased masses of oxblood-red paint might resemble a dog or other creature-like figure, rendered with the rawness of Soutine’s Carcass of Beef canvases or Francis Bacon’s nightmarish smears trying to flee the frame.
That first painting is titled Merani, after an 1842 poem by the Georgian Romantic poet Nikoloz Baratashvili, in which a rider drives his horse through an unknown landscape, propelled by urgent motion and uncertainty:
*Cut through the wind, divide the tide
Cross crags and chasms in your stride.
Fly on, and with your swiftness spare
These days grown heavy with despair. *
Kintsurashvili first saw something like this figure in the painting, but the image didn’t last. Very little survives in her works: Byzantine and Georgian iconography, archaeological seals, vessels and reliefs, and children’s book illustrations drawn from her vast research archive. Paint goes on thick and gets scraped back, sometimes on the same afternoon.
What remains is the sense of motion, carried by an edge or contour that persists even as the original reference falls away. From a distance, the paintings hold together in large shapes, sometimes deceptively simple in their arrangement. Up close, those shapes collapse into short, gestural brushstrokes, and new partial forms follow, as if emerging or disappearing from the picture plane. The square format intensifies this sensation, cropping the image as if something were always about to rupture, or run.
This rupture has a history, though the paintings resist illustrating it. Kintsurashvili grew up in Georgia in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, surrounded by the uncertainty of a changing world and its unstable relics: frescoes of earlier civilizations painted over, then uncovered, leaving traces of different moments on the surface. Far from expressionist angst, her gestures are, in the artist’s words, closer to “building a syntax.” Approaching painting through a Synthetist sensibility, Kintsurashvili allows each work to find its own logic, and the logics don’t always align, even as each sets the terms for the next.
Kintsurashvili has cited Deleuze’s lecture series On Painting and his idea of the catastrophe: the wrong turn in the middle of a painting, when its order breaks down. Misreadings, double readings, and incomplete information, which she sees as generative, are built into the gestures themselves, and using abstraction to find a structure within that disorder is central to the work. A seam makes a division visible, joining one thing to another while leaving evidence of the break and the repair. In Kintsurashvili’s sutures, wholeness emerges not despite fragmentation, but through it.