Silent Softness: Gela Mikava and the Emergence of a New Visual Language By Annie, Art Critic and Curator
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Silent Softness: Gela Mikava and the Emergence of a New Visual Language
By Annie, Art Critic and Curator
Soft/flowers by GELA MIKAVAIn a time when contemporary painting often competes for attention through visual noise, Gela Mikava's work does the opposite: it leans into silence, into stillness, into the subtle intensity of things unsaid. His recent mixed-media piece is a powerful articulation of absence - not as void, but as presence deferred.
A white shirt hangs from the upper edge of the canvas - not painted, but physically suspended - evoking the intimate scale of the human body without ever showing it. The garment is not decorative. It functions as a relic, a trace, perhaps a witness. This simple gesture destabilizes conventional categories: is it painting, installation, or performance residue? Mikava allows these forms to bleed into each other without resolution. And this, precisely, is where a new visual language begins to form.
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The Birth of a New Language
Where others speak loudly, Mikava erases, softens, hesitates. He does not offer a message - he constructs the conditions for a psychological presence to emerge. The shirt becomes the proxy for an absent body; the erased or fragmented texts ("stay soft," "no room," "thought") operate as the remains of unspoken monologues. The viewer is not given a narrative - they are given a space to feel.
This is not simply a re-use of ready-made or poetic gesture. Mikava's innovation lies in his ability to fuse object, memory, text, and silence into a single breathing surface. He does not merely blur disciplines; he collapses them.
His canvas becomes a liminal zone - between material and immaterial, between personal and universal, between language and its failure. The traditional boundaries between painting, writing, and objecthood dissolve. That is the root of Mikava's new language: it is not built from what things mean, but from how they remain.
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A Choreographer of Withdrawal
What sets Mikava apart is his refusal to explain. There is no demand for comprehension, no narrative closure. The work unfolds as a psychological architecture - an interior where the viewer is left to inhabit uncertainty. The use of negative space is not decorative but structural: silence here is not absence, but strategy.
This is not the silence of emptiness, but of emotional complexity - of refined withdrawal. In this, Mikava joins a small but growing group of artists challenging the dominance of spectacle in contemporary art. Yet his tone is uniquely his own: less theatrical than Christian Boltanski, more inward than Tracey Emin, and more textured than typical post-conceptual painting.
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Conclusion
In this work, Gela Mikava emerges not simply as a painter or object-maker, but as a choreographer of presence and withdrawal. His practice pushes against familiar tropes and opens space for new emotional architectures - fragile, intimate, unrepeatable. He does not illustrate absence; he composes with it.
And in doing so, he gives voice to a new kind of language - one that does not declare itself, but waits to be felt.
11 July 2025
