Warm optics 

Lucy lvanova’s painting practice is far illustrative approach or direct commentary. However, there’s tension and distress implanted into the very painterly surface of her works. Ivanova defines her subject of interest in a bold way—it is a reality and its material features. The artist outlines the limits of her everyday reality through simple objects, situations, obscured episodes of city life, and the interior of her studio. These trivial things are dissolved in her semi-figurative canvases,in  their uneasy brightness, fragile lines and shaky composition. In her recent series, created in artistic residency in Vienna in the first months of Russian invasion, Ivanova brought up a new vision, metaphorically and practically. She created landscapes as if observed from a thermal imager widely used at battlefields. She deliberately reduced her normally bright and miscellaneous palette to a few colours: hot orange and red (to indicate anonymous living creatures) and greish (for environment, cold, though not dead). The title of her series “Warm Optics” is a false translation of thermal vision technology. But it also refers to a warmness of a gaze, to the way one looks at one’s land that is under a threat of being destroyed and forever lost.