Larisa Brechuns: Somnia @ Ryan Graff Contemporary

The subtle qualities of the soul—softness, stillness, fragility, solitude—are often belittled for their “weakness," dismissed as defects of simpering prey in a predatory age, where might and volume rule and humanity fills its hours with chatter and self-exposure. Introspection is the enemy of the social machine, softness a death sentence, silence a grave. And yet, these delicate instincts are essential to the most intimate operation of the soul: the dream.

In Larisa Brechuns’s Somnia, the artist lays bare the quiet privacy of the dreaming mind and the fugitive debris of memory, myth, and imagination as it freely floats in the cocoon of sleep, coalescing into mysterious forms that defy daylight logic. Under her gentle hand, soft animal bodies take shape alongside evaporating cosmic beings and primordial symbols of wilderness, all adrift in the penumbra of the dreaming state, suspended in etheric margins between the deep woodland dark and the flirting light of a winking moon.

Brechun’s darkness has substance, an amplitude of unseen marrow with texture and weight, like a cave or a chrysalis. Lonely figures gently emerge from abyssal thickets, twisting into the light of the omnipresent moon’s awareness as quickly as they recede. They are camouflaged by silence and shadow, hiding by turns in shyness, in stillness, in pain, in contemplation, their bodies alternating between states of rest and transmutation. The paintings reveal only as much as they desire to be perceived in their tender in-betweenness, a simultaneous urge to hide and to illuminate.

Brechun’s sensitivity to the transience between light and dark, hiding and illuminating, imbues Somnia with a sincerity that is both self-disclosing and universal. She is intimately attuned to the beauty of retreating inclinations, the gentle parts of the self that are necessary for the soul’s ceaseless project of becoming, where vulnerability is the grist of soul-making. Without it, the roaming residue of the dreaming dark has no oxygen, and imagination, anchorless, shrinks. The living world loses dimension, the soul atrophies.

Those subtle qualities, those delicate instincts–to hide, to be still, to remain soft–are the prima materia of being human.