At IDENTICA gallery, in Tbilisi Georgia, the pairing of Tornike Koiava and Sopho Mamaladze unfolds as an exhibition revealing states of psychic permeability. Across painting, wood panels, and works on paper, the presentation constructs a visual atmosphere where memory, and bodily sensation remain unstable, continuously slipping between emergence and disappearance. Rather than collapsing the two practices into a singular dialogue, the exhibition allows each artist to retain a distinct visual syntax while revealing unexpected correspondences in tone, materiality, and emotional charge.
Mamaladze’s works operate through symbolic compression. Figures appear suspended between apparition and animal presence, as though identity itself were mutating under emotional pressure. Her surfaces carry a tactile density that resists easy legibility. Some forms seem excavated rather than painted, pulled from an interior register where instinct overtakes language. The recurring fusion of human and creature transforms her paintings into sites of psychological ritual, where tenderness and unease coexist without hierarchy. The smaller works on wood intensify this effect, their intimate scale producing the sensation of talismans or fragments recovered from private mythologies.
Koiava’s paintings move differently. When Mamaladze compresses, Koiava suspends. Within his work, we witness figures hovering within shifting spatial fields that feel simultaneously theatrical and dreamlike, as though the scene exists just before coherence fully arrives. Ambiguity extends through dissolving contours and muted tonal shifts that render bodies inseparable from the atmosphere itself. His work continually approaches recognition only to retreat from it, allowing memory to function less as recollection than as sensation.
What the exhibition ultimately achieves is a curatorial rhythm built through friction rather than harmony. The works do not mirror one another so much as activate different psychological temperatures within the same spatial field. Intimacy meets distance, myth meets dissolution, and gesture becomes a method of navigating what cannot be fully articulated. Moving through the exhibition, the viewer oscillates between Mamaladze’s densely symbolic interiors and Koiava’s suspended, atmospheric environments, producing a perceptual instability that feels central to the exhibition’s success. The installation resists definitive answers, allowing meaning to emerge, but also retreat, gradually through material echoes and repeated encounters with forms that seem perpetually on the verge of transformation.
The result is an exhibition that understands painting as a site of psychological unearthing. By marinating in the state of the unresolved, the show creates a presentation that feels attuned to the fragile and unstable conditions through which contemporary subjectivity is often experienced. —Charles Moore
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