For Natalia Ivanov, a period of interruption has resulted in a new approach to artmaking that is rendering productive her pause, her absence from art. When Natalia Ivanov finished art school in São Paulo in 2015, feeling full of possibility and creative energy, her life and painting practice were very different from what they are now. After a period assisting two prominent painters in São Paulo, Ivanov suddenly paused her artistic path because, as it was explained, “life circumstances led Natalia back to Campinas.” Ivanov took a ten-year hiatus, a literal process of not-making-art, which has now assumed a central role as a material in the artist’s new oeuvre of paintings on view at Yehudi Hollander-Pappi Gallery in São Paulo, Brazil.
Ivanov’s work is not the first instance of time as a medium of the painterly project. Time has been used as a material of painting many times before, as a marker of a painting practice that unfolds slowly or over long durations, as in Roman Opalka’s work—an expression of ongoing pictorial seriality where passing time had become, in many ways, the subject of the work itself.
But Ivanov’s is not a practice of duration, endurance, or expanded temporal expansion. Rather, her work is a result of turning inactive time into a constituent material in her current practice—a “time-not-spent-painting” turned into the medium of the work. It is interesting that Ivanov’s current work has been compared to Agnes Martin—a certain minimal sensibility, almost imperceptible color ranges, muted whites, layers of paint that transmute into opaque, meditative surfaces. Perhaps more compelling than these visual or formal parallels is the fact that Agnes Martin’s career also was famously defined by a break in working, a gap of ten years spent in the desert meditating, which ended with a radical new body of work in which Martin introduced color.
Before I met Natalia Ivanov or saw her paintings, she was introduced as “an artist whose journey and work are particularly meaningful,” but I had not imagined the extent to which I would come to understand her journey as more than process in the conventional sense of the word. Once I had the opportunity to meet her and see some of her new works, I came to see that her “time-not-painting” has become a different medium (or a different material) in her life and work as a painter.
During that challenging period, Ivanov did not paint, but in time returned with a renewed sense of herself. Her renaissance was facilitated in 2024 by Matheus Yehudi Hollander’s offer of a studio space to paint and some time away from her daughter. In the artist’s own words, “After I stopped painting ten years ago, now painting decisions are a result of my new beginning.” Natalia talked about her studio practice before the pause: “Before, I did a lot of experimentation with oil painting using a square canvas, flat surface, and the application of objects, such as earrings onto the surface, in a ‘liberated way.’” Recently, she has returned to some of the same conventional painting materials, but in a very different manner, with the added element of time away from her practice. As she has said, “This period [of non-painting] was so traumatizing that I now feel the materials in a different way, and I try to use them in a way that shows my feelings…”
The recent paintings are made using a very limited palette which produces almost invisible lines or pulses across the canvas created by rendering fields of gentle color buried in an opaque hazy white. At first glance, a painting like No Pain, 2024, evokes a feeling of introspection likely inspired by the effervescent white, but that perspective changes when she explains that the white “nothingness” is made up of many layers of color — black or blue in the earliest examples and later with the use of yellow and even magenta. The resulting “fogginess” contains underneath many color ways and plastic textures. Although the resulting paintings appear to be purely abstract and minimal, her choices evolve from moments in daily life, like the yellow simulating pedals falling onto a surface in Simple Love, 2025 or rows of circles simulating eyes in No Tears, 2024. Even the roughness that resulted from layered color renderings in the white paintings has come to be more prominently revealed in her daring use of cut fabric in Little Angel, 2024 and in her use of folded canvas in Simple Love, 2025.
As Ivanov starts to take her paintings off the wall and combine them with torn and folded elements, these new soft three-dimensional artworks convey a sense that the artist is trying to say something with a certain language that has yet to be fully formed. As she says, “In this phase of me renewing my relationship with the basics of painting materials […] I am showing myself as a person that others would not expect […] seeing the past as something that remains as only a few elements.” The work is both liberated by and at the same time limited by an economy of means.
In the monumental work entitled Gloria, 2024, a painting cum tapestry cum wall sculpture, which measures 205 by 390 centimeters, there is an unprecedented confluence of confidence and susceptibility. It is bathed in a bluish white hue that seems to radiate from the strips of torn canvas woven tightly in the middle and loosely at the frayed ends where gravity allows them to relax and fall one on top of the other. Gloria’s scale and material use invokes so many different emotions — awe at a weaver’s work-in-progress on the loom and at the same time desire to be enveloped in a familiar blanket. By allowing the work to be finished in its state of not being bound to a fixed shape or dimension, by being rough on the edges yet soft, and by having a gradient of color that depends so heavily on light and immediacy, Ivanov reenters the world of art as an entirely renewed and confident creative individual, yet also allowing for the possibility that something as-of-yet encountered may come into the fold.
-Cay Sophie Rabinowitz