The Layer That Isn’t Yours: On Alex Kuznetsov & Mitya Pisliak’s collaborative series

These works begin with restraint — with the slow, measured logic of Alex Kuznetsov’s abstract surfaces. Each one is built through duration: a single directional sweep, a weighty gesture made with a straightedge, a surface that resists instant legibility. But then, something breaks through.

Into these slow-built fields comes an unexpected figure — cartoonish, pink-limbed, strangely embodied. It doesn’t merge. It doesn’t ask permission. It simply appears, unapologetically graphic, unapologetically narrative. The interruption is the point.

In this five-part series created in collaboration with New York–based artist Mitya Pisliak, the canvas becomes a stage for encounter. Pisliak’s language — part streetwise absurdity, part existential strip — lands like a foreign voice mid-sentence.

His drawn figures aren’t decorative flourishes; they’re protagonists. Sometimes lounging on beach chairs, sometimes tightrope-walking across black-and-white turbulence, sometimes mopping or painting the very gestures Kuznetsov made.

Their role is ambiguous: invaders, interpreters, performers? Perhaps all three.

This is not layering as accumulation. It’s layering as conflict. The abstract field, once self-contained, becomes a landscape — a setting. Sometimes it reads as sun, sometimes as stage light, sometimes as a storm. Pisliak’s figures don’t explain it. They inhabit it. Irony, vulnerability, and theatricality circulate freely.

The collaboration doesn't seek unity. It foregrounds mismatch: of tone, of pace, of technique. Kuznetsov’s process resists speed; Pisliak’s characters thrive on punchlines. That clash is structural. These are not mixed-media paintings — they are dialogic spaces, split between abstraction and narrative, contemplation and comic relief.

Born in Belarus and now based in New York, Pisliak brings into the work his ongoing investigation of contemporary masculinity, labor, absurdity, and alienation. His protagonists often appear anonymous yet hyper-individualized — bodies that are both exposed and encoded. By placing them atop Kuznetsov’s austere fields, he injects an irreverent fragility that disarms the solemnity of abstraction.

What results is a choreography of contradiction: the stillness of one voice, the movement of another. The canvases don’t ask you to choose sides — they ask you to stay in between. To accept the tension. To notice how absurdity can reveal structure, and how silence can become a stage.

These are not answers. They are events.