How do we do in the moments when nothing happens? We fill them with plans, news, and everyday routine. In the pause between events, a person engages themselves. The artists in this issue discover that emptiness is not an absence, but a space open to allowing something new to enter.

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Dina Bukva captures the spontaneous afternoons of childhood friendship, a time when closeness grows naturally, simply because no one was in a hurry. Jan Dudek leaves the canvas unfinished so that the past retains the same uncertainty as memory. Kseniya Lokteva allows facial features to dissolve into brushstrokes, preferring the quiet detachment of a half‑empty space. In each case, the canvas becomes a sanctuary for what everyday life tends to miss.​

 

Before the artist says anything, the artwork already speaks for itself. A crack in the porcelain, a stain of paint that defies the intended design: the physical nature of the material is not a shell for the idea, but the idea itself. For NASKA, materiality is combined with the philosophy of kintsugi: the golden cracks on porcelain apples are not a flaw in the form, but its most honest state. Jane Birchall works literally with the hands of several generations, weaving Gozitan lace into ceramics, so that the texture of the clay meets the texture of memory.

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Vladimir Semenskiy describes a process in which the artist’s personal “self” must disappear before pure creation begins. Wisdom, according to him, is the right to emptiness. He also formulates a paradox the classical academic school, from which he eventually left, turned out to be precisely the foundation that today ensures his autonomy; mastery, in his words, exists only to be forgotten in the end. Whereas Kseniya Lokteva believes the knowledge she gained at the Academy, which she calls freedom from ignorance, allows her not to think about technique at all and to move directly towards the atmosphere and essence.

 

There are artists whose craft begins with hands instead of canvas, hands that held a brush or a needle long before them. What seems like a personal choice of style, upon closer examination, turns out to be a family legacy adopted, reinterpreted, or rediscovered for the first time. NASKA grew up in a family of artists, but emigration and motherhood made her speak in her own voice for the first time; her series ‘Fragile World’ is evidence of rebuilding herself anew. She deliberately works in series because, as she admits, the mind works more actively precisely when there are boundaries that cannot be crossed.