Within the Paris program of Galleria Continua, the solo exhibitions of Zhanna Kadyrova and Osvaldo González – Ukrainian and Cuban artists respectively, born in 1981 and 1982 – share a space and a moment, yet they seem to stem from distant, almost incompatible orbits. And yet, it is precisely from this friction, between historical violence and everyday affect, catastrophe and intimacy, that a common visual field emerges: one in which memory becomes a constructive act, a material and embodied form.
Osvaldo Gonzáles, “Descendencia”, 2025, exhibition view, GALLERIA CONTINUA Paris Marais, Photo: Hafid Lhachmi, ©ADAGP Paris, 2025, courtesy GALLERIA CONTINUA
With Strategic Locations, Zhanna Kadyrova brings the tragic density of her native Ukraine into the gallery space through works created directly in war-torn areas. Her installations do not represent violence; they embody it. Beams, bricks, stripped wood, fragments of architecture, what might elsewhere be seen as debris or ruin becomes, in her hands, a tangible testimony, the plastic body of destruction. In the series HOME, the national map is split apart; in Resources, mutilated logs wrapped in camouflage fabric take on the appearance of wounded bodies. Here, art does not seek the distance of sublimation, it becomes immediate, visceral, a chronicle in the flesh. This ethical tension reveals itself in a practice that is both political and poetic. Kadyrova does not aestheticize the wound; she preserves it, transferring it onto a symbolic plane that questions the function of art in conflict times. The exhibition becomes a disarticulated atlas of Ukrainian geography, where places are no longer names on a map, but scars on the surface of the present.
Zhanna Kadyrova, “Strategic Locations”, 2025, exhibition view, GALLERIA CONTINUA Paris Marais, Photo: Hafid Lhachmi, ©ADAGP Paris, 2025, courtesy GALLERIA CONTINUA
Of a completely different tone, but no less intense, is Osvaldo González’s Descendencia. Here, time does not erupt as rupture but unfolds through layers of affection. The central material, adhesive tape, is both fragile and resilient, transparent and opaque. González uses it to construct environments that exist somewhere between architecture and light, presence and reflection. There are no traces of war, but instead the slow construction of emotional heritage: one that connects the artist to his daughters, to personal memory, to a temporality that doesn’t explode but flows. The two primary series in the exhibition, Ámbar and Jade, are more than chromatic variations, they are symbolic codes that transform personal experience into poetic structure. Amber evokes warmth and nostalgia; jade speaks of rebirth and protection. Each work becomes an emotional deposit (his daughters), a weave of light and shadow that materializes in space until it becomes form, object, sculpture. In the site-specific installation Flujo, a line of tape runs through the gallery space like a tangible link between artworks and people, not a linear narrative, but a current of presence, of gestures, of nearness.
Osvaldo Gonzáles, “Descendencia”, 2025, installation view, GALLERIA CONTINUA Paris Marais, Photo: Hafid Lhachmi, ©ADAGP Paris, 2025, courtesy GALLERIA CONTINUA
Kadyrova and González never cross paths, but the contrast between their practices raises essential questions: what remains, today, of the notion of “memory” in art? Is it still possible to construct a visual discourse that speaks of trauma and tenderness, of violence and care, without falling into rhetoric or self-referentiality? Both seem to answer with a quiet but determined yes, through a radical faith in matter: whether concrete or tape, shattered wood or filtered light, the artwork becomes a means of restoring presence to what risks erasure. Kadyrova’s is a sculpture of resistance; González’s, an architecture of intimacy. Between these poles, exterior and interior, History and stories, the viewer is asked not only to look, but to consider how, and where, they continue to look.
Zhanna Kadyrova, “Strategic Locations”, 2025, installation view, GALLERIA CONTINUA Paris Marais, Photo: Hafid Lhachmi, ©ADAGP Paris, 2025, courtesy GALLERIA CONTINUA
There is also an implicit but powerful reflection on matter. Cement and ceramics on the one hand, adhesive tape on the other, become vehicles for a discourse that is not just formal, but profoundly political: in their confrontation, two opposing modes of resistance are revealed. Kadyrova embodies the memory of destruction, González that of survival. In this double exhibition project, Galleria Continua proposes not just two exhibitions, but a device of confrontation, where the visitor is called upon to move between two modes of evoking space: one that observes it in its structural fragility, the other that reconstructs it in its emotional fragility. It is in the gap – between collective and individual, between weight and lightness, between rupture and suture – that a fertile ground for reflection opens up on the way in which, today, art can still restore meaning to the places that people inhabit.
Info:
Zhanna Kadyrova. Strategic Locations / Osvaldo Gonzáles / Descendencia
28/03 – 28/05 2025
Galleria Continua
87 Rue du Temple, Parigi (FR)
www.galleriacontinua.com
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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