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Nina Kintsurashvili portrait by Mehdi Ben Temessek -
Work In Progress
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ARTWORK
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End of Residency
Over the course of six weeks in Tunisia, Nina Kintsurashvili has been developing a new body of paintings through a process embracing the notion of “catastrophe”. This is not the spectacle of ruin, but the necessary collapse through which painting comes into being. The myth of the blank canvas is contested; its surface is already crowded with images, sediments. The notion of catastrophe is important to the artist’s practice who recalls Gilles Deleuze’s reflections in On Painting, where catastrophe entails the need “to jettison everything that has preceded it, everything that weighs on the painting before the painting has begun to emerge”. It is the “struggle with ghosts that precedes painting”.[1] Painting begins by disturbing this occupancy, allowing forms to falter and certainties to collapse so that something unforeseen may take hold. For Kintsurashvili, the question is: “will today’s painting yield to an imperious collapse or to a momentary resolution?”. A field of chance is then carefully curated, inviting nebulous proximities and improbable correspondences. What ultimately survives this process is beyond the artist’s control. Any cerebral or rational ordering has to be suspended when approaching the catastrophe, as one must simply stand before the avalanche as it arrives, just to see what lies beneath the mountain’s slope.Historical iconography, archaeological fragments, Roman mosaics preserved in Tunisia’s museums and ancient sites, and dispersed visual archives circulate through the studio, awaiting to enter the duration of the painting itself. Their presence is not illustrative but catalytic. The painting gradually gathers its material, internalising what passes before it; a contour, a fragment, a chromatic relation. Colour is registered as a record of both presence and absence through subtraction as much as accumulation, where layers of paint accrue only to be scraped back. The mosaic fragments that recur as references are themselves survivors of catastrophe, and among the mosaics encountered across Tunisia it was precisely their incompletions that compelled the artist. Preserved through processes of excavation and restoration, their surfaces bear the missing tesserae openly. Such lacunae reveal the abstract potential of what is absent while mirroring the processes of time, fragmentation and condition in her paintings. The works begin beyond the references themselves, from what remains pre-internalised, that which she encounters before full absorption. These forms refuse to dissipate and, in pursuit of the interstice, such arrangement take place. The emptiness is suggestive, and the artist’s effort lies not in reconstruction but in making conjectures about that beckoning silence.The artist begins by tracing what she terms as the technical signs. If looking resembles scanning a text, drawing becomes a slower but active form of reading, although here the discourse is purely visual rather than narrative. Emptiness, however, does not signify vacancy. It recalls Lao Tzu’s observation that it is the empty space within the vessel that grants it its use. There is fullness to emptiness, and it is within this that Kintsurashvili locates abstraction. The brushstrokes carry sweeping forces in them as much as density. Some advance and jerk abruptly, while others assume their altered guises. “Catastrophe is the locus of forces.”[2] It is here that the crumbling gaps of previous destructions are made visible through a formless force, continually metamorphosing into rhythms that harmonise and antagonise across scumbles of paint.Racha Khemiri. Tunis, June 2026.
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OPEN STUDIO
Nafas Collection Villa
Nina Kintsurashvili: Residency in M9
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