taisiia cherkasova

the deepest thoughts come in the silence of the night

november 15, 2024 - january 05, 2025

Siddiq Projects is delighted to announce The deepest thoughts come in the silence of the night, a solo presentation of works by the Paris-based artist Taisiia Cherkasova.

The exhibition explores Cherkasova’s intrinsic fascination with everything hidden from eyesight, tucked away by darkness. In a quest to find herself in the dark she encounters all sorts of characters, beasts besieged by the same desires, to free themselves of some sort of conformity and rediscover the wilderness within themselves.

Dominant in all the works is her own exploration of the symbolism of animals and humans, which are repeatedly brought to the forefront and inhabit the scenes, as some sort of lost protagonists. Without fundamentally changing their metaphorical meaning, Cherkasova uses them to express herself, to find herself in the reactions to their surroundings. Serpent à plume is such work, where the vulnerability of the nude seems to blur and dissolve in the depths of the primordial black backdrop.

In Mistral it is the horse, or rather, it’s his torso in turmoil, leaping forward, full of unrest. Influenced by her own nightmare, Cherkasova provides her horse figure a visceral reaction to the horrors it witnesses within the painting. It is her defined use of airbrush that softens the otherwise untamed creature and gives the scene its dreamlike state in which we can fully embrace the chaos we get entangled in as spectators.

Her sculptural work is another example of such a notion, where hidden meanings are evoked through a push and pull of depicted intensity. Again it is the horse in Casse-tête that provides the starting point of Cherkasova’s preoccupation with herself. It’s the ambiguity of its character, where discipline and sheer insurgency go hand in hand, that keeps Cherkasova repeatedly return to the motive. The formal language of the brass knuckle, in which the horse is integrated, is just another allusion to its ambiguous character. In French, casse-tête means to „give someone a headache“, which in Ukrainian is used as the literal word for brass knuckles.

It is this interplay of ambiguity, hidden meanings, and metaphor that shapes Cherkasova’s visual vocabulary, allowing her to embed her personal experiences deeply into her work. Highly autobiographical, she has developed a style that is both uniquely personalized in technique and narrative, leading her audience through these nocturnal journeys into a dreamlike world.