Exhibition 24 January - 31 March 2026

LOVE & DISORDER

Works on paper

Viola Winokan’s drawings from the series Love & DisOrder Publishers occupy a space between image, language, and inner dialogue. Executed in pastel, graphite, and charcoal, they appear at first glance like book covers — bold color fields carrying handwritten titles that mimic the authority of printed text, addressing big life subjects — love, death, work — through short, pointed lines of language. Each title reads like a proposition, a confession, or a dry aside. Love – Any Objections? Death – It happens to the best of us. About Love – or at least about what it could have been. The phrasing is concise, but its resonance is open-ended and its humor disarms. 

By isolating language on expansive fields of color, the drawings invite the viewer into a pause. The text does not explain itself — it waits. Meaning emerges in the space between the words and the viewer’s own experience. What initially feels light or familiar slowly reveals psychological depth.

Love is questioned, negotiated, revisited. Death is neither dramatized nor denied; it is stated with a sober irony that acknowledges its inevitability without sentimentality. Loss, longing, repetition, and hope surface quietly, often through a subtle twist in wording.

The handwritten text — carefully rendered to resemble print — holds a tension between intimacy and distance. It suggests both personal authorship and collective familiarity, as if these statements could belong to anyone. The viewer is to recognize themselves within Viola’s work: their own histories of attachment, disappointment, desire, grief.

Like covers of unfinished books, Viola's drawings promise a story but refuse to tell it. They function as mirrors and return the question to the viewer — asking what love means, what death is, how loss is carried, and how language itself shapes our understanding of the most fundamental human experiences.