Page 76 - Steppe - Aigana Gali

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Aigana
There are some places, certain underpasses, verges or gaps in the built environment that are completely overlooked. Empty, hazy spaces between the carved up, portioned out cityscape that seem to have no value, belong to no-one. To get to Aigana Gali’s studio you have to pass through one of these disquieting zones in central London. Down a side passageway, through an uncomfortably low parking lot where irregular concrete pillars are gashed with car paint, and on into the underbelly of a high-rise; its uniform grid of characterless rooms yawing up into an overcast sky. Underneath this behemoth, through a yellowed door time marked with finger prints, is a humble, windowless room, lit from above by a bare strip of LED light. The floor, carpeted so long ago every fibre has sunk and welded to the cement beneath, is now a brownish layer of sediment. There is no furniture other than a large centrally positioned formica table and a single chair... and yet entering this room is as mind altering as being in a foreign land.
The first time I followed the artist Aigana into her “studio cave”, something on the back of her long flowing, cloak - inside a hand painted symbol of an eye - winked at me. As the door swung open, I paused on the threshold, overcome with a kind of vertigo. I seemed to be looking out at something vast, like the window of a plane as it breaks through the clouds into the full beams of a new dawn; sunlight bouncing along a candy floss sea. Lining the walls were variously proportioned large and medium canvas shimmering in washes of delicate, luminous colour. At first glance, one might say colour fields (and the artists they call to mind are relevant to our discussion), but there is nothing explicitly geographic or landed about them. They are auric, mysterious and engulf you in a kind of pigment storm, one that embodies the mutable, almost indescribable interplay of light and dust of the wide open desert. Like mirages, these paintings transport the mind, and trigger the emotions in unpredictable ways.
“Kazakhstan is dominated by vast barren lands of the Central Asian steppe. Just like the ocean, it is a vast horizon of “nothing” that holds much magic inside. My Steppe paintings describe the ever changing theatre of light and colour found in these wide open, empty spaces.”