Art film Nina Sechko for RobineauArt gallery exhibition PORTAL YouTube

I paint slowly. Sometimes for more than a month. The big paintings are about 3-4 months. This time is really matters to me. I know a painting is finished when everything inside me becomes quiet. Sometimes I need to step away, give it a few days and look again. If there is a calm inside, then the work is ready. Right now I'm preparing for a group exhibition that will be in January in Rubino Art Gallery. The exhibition is called Portal. This Syria was born not as an image, but more as a feeling. In my paintings, Portal is not a magical object. This is a moment, a moment of transformation that is happening inside. The first painting is called Trust. Here the portal is a movement in a blue dark corridor. Fear disappears into the unknown, but ahead there is always a light. A girl moves toward it without looking back, trusting her intuition and the feeling of warmth. Here fear gives a way for curiosity and the unknown becomes a promise. The second painting is called The Self in plural. Here a portal is an inward. A triple mirror reveals a multiplicity of the inner world. The same girl appears in different states, observing, withdrawn and one who meets the purest gaze for the first time. Light reflects within light. Space closes its boundaries. This portal is not an exit out of the world, but this is a very quiet dialogue between the painting and the one who is looking. The third painting is called The Fragility of a Moment. For me, here are two portals. The first one is a moment and the second one is a mirror. The mirror is a portal between inner and outer world. A girl stands by a window, floated with sunlight, and the point where reflection and reality coincide. Light behind her pushes the shadow away. A falling grace of the daisies captures this fragile instant, the moment where the beauty and anxiety exist at the same time. In the gallery, silence feels different. The works stop being mine the moment they leave the studio. I mostly observe. I watch whether people feel something of their own. For me, these works are not about answers. They are about a state of transition, about that quiet inner place where light always remains a point of attraction.