Olia Breva’s New 2026 Project
“Don’t make me laugh”
Memory habitually edits everything that life leaves within it.
With time, names and faces disappear; the causes of both external and inner anxieties are erased; events lose their sequence. What remains are colours, scents, a gesture, the sensation of movement: people were going somewhere, carrying something, hurrying, afraid - but why?
It is precisely this residual reality that the artist works with.
Olia Breva’s new body of paintings explores what can happen to this world once it enters the inner realm of the human mind. Proportions begin to shift, forms become distorted, space loses its logic; the familiar turns absurd, and at times everything is reduced to the simplest, almost childlike concepts. Through the grotesque, the artist exposes distortions of reason, ethics, and morality within the movements of the contemporary world.
Human life appears here as a strange choreography of disparate actions - consumed by desires and fears, and filled with rituals that once seemed immensely important, yet with time have become little more than a handful of differently shaped marks within the cells of someone’s memory.
Beyond this personal memory lies another - ancient and ancestral. The Armenian cultural code is present almost imperceptibly: as a sense of historical depth, of the land, and of a form capable of surviving destruction, disappearance, and return.
From this emerges one of the project’s central figures: the earthly angel, gradually losing some of its feathers. An angel who has lived. Who has, at times, fallen and risen again.
In this world, the loss of feathers is inevitable, yet much depends upon the angel itself. Like memory, its wing grows sparse and changes with time.
In a world saturated with images and noise, this painting operates on a different frequency. It restores to the viewer the capacity to see through fragments, pauses, and imperfection.
And in the end, what remains is what a human being has managed to preserve - and, more importantly, what others have been unable to destroy within that person’s world.
WORKS EXHIBITED IN VENICE
In Anticipation of Amazing Events, 2025, 60 x 50 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
Amazing Events, 2025, 60 x 50 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
Escaping Amazing Events, 2025, 40 x 50 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
Morning Pulsation, 2025, 50 x 60 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
Wandering the World, 2026, 80 x 100 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
About Important Things, 2024, 40 x 30 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
About Important Things, 2024, 40 x 30 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
Wise Man or Zayka, 2024, 40 x 50 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
To nowhere, 2024, 50 x 60 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
Way Home, 2024, 50 x 70 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
Wanderer, 2024, 56 x 78 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
Shelter, 2024, 18 x 24 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
Bear Be Brave!, 2024, 60 x 80 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
Bear Be Brave!, 2024, 60 x 80 cm - Oil on canvas, mixed media
