CURATORIAL REVIEW | December 11, 2025
THE ECHO OF UNSAID STORIES:
Spectral presences, fractured memories, and the quiet resilience of the human psyche
Written by Laura Acosta
Between the Tremor and the Trace
— Where Presence Falters into Memory
There is a specific kind of silence that follows an event we cannot quite name. It is not absence, but density — a charged stillness in which gestures, glances, and half-formed memories float like dust in a darkened room. Vika Bis paints inside that silence. Her canvases unfold as psychic interiors where the human figure appears at once present and dissolving, caught between the desire to be seen and the urge to retreat into shadow.
At first encounter, her portraits and group scenes strike us through their ghosts. Faces emerge from layered veils of grey, ash, and muted flesh; eyes look back at us with intense clarity while the rest of the body seems to fray, smear, or vanish into the background. The paint is dragged, scratched, and wiped away as much as it is applied, creating a surface that feels wounded, insistently reworked. Each canvas reads like an emotional palimpsest — traces of previous images remain under the final one, as if identity itself could never be fully fixed.
The Emotional Palimpsest
— Gestures, Surfaces, and the Geography of Instability
This tension is particularly evident in her solitary figures. The sitter often occupies the centre of the composition, yet their features are fractured or partially erased. The line between face and mask becomes unstable: cheeks invaded by dark stains, mouths blurred into smudges, eyes ringed by shadow. Rather than depicting a single psychological state, Vika allows conflicting affects to coexist within the same visage — fear and defiance, vulnerability and opacity, tenderness and estrangement. Her protagonists seem to carry a story that resists narrative closure; they are not characters in a scene, but living questions.
The palette reinforces this sense of disquiet. Vika favours a world of ashen blacks, damp greens, and dirty whites, punctuated by occasional bursts of red or ochre that feel almost like injuries on the surface of the image. Light does not illuminate; it reveals scars. Drips of paint slide downward like rain on a window, suggesting the passage of time or the slow erosion of certainty.
Families, Fractures, and the Architecture of Inherited Silence
In the multi-figure works, this uncertainty expands into the realm of family and community. Groups of children and adults gather in ambiguous spaces — under an umbrella, in a living room, on what might be a patch of ground or a faded rug. They pose for an invisible camera, echoing the conventions of the family snapshot, but something is off. Bodies are misaligned, gestures seem interrupted, and the atmosphere is strangely airless. The painting does not celebrate unity; it stages the fragile choreography of being together while remaining deeply alone.
Even in proximity, each figure is enclosed in a private zone of opacity, a small enclosure of unspoken experience. Vika exposes the emotional weight of inherited histories — the intergenerational tremors that seep into gestures, relationships, and the stories families prefer not to articulate.
The Unstable Portrait — Identity as a Site of Becoming
Nowhere is Vika’s vision more potent than in her faces. Eyes lock with the viewer in moments of piercing directness, yet the mouth dissolves, the jawline fades, the skin bruises under opaque strokes. These distortions are not acts of violence, but acts of truth — they reveal identity as something unstable, partially erased, carried through generations.
These faces echo archival photographs: haunted, intimate, uncanny. But Vika interrupts the archive with painterly ruptures — scratches, drips, stains — turning each portrait into a living, trembling archive of emotion.
Tenderness Within the Fracture — The Ethics of Witnessing
Despite their spectral quality, Vika’s works pulse with tenderness. A soft tilt of the head, the faint glow around a child’s cheek, a resting hand — moments of care resist the surrounding darkness. The paintings protect their subjects, even as they reveal their vulnerability.
The viewer is not asked to judge but to witness — to stand before these images and acknowledge the ambiguity within them as a mirror of our own. Vika’s practice becomes a meditation on the fragile resilience of the human psyche, the stories carried in silence, and the beauty that persists within fracture.
In Vika Bis’ canvases, the human figure is never stable, but it never fully disappears. It lingers in the unresolved zone between the tremor and the trace — fragile, fractured, and profoundly alive.
PRESS VERSION — VIKA BIS
Vika Bis creates haunting psychological portraits where figures emerge from layered greys and disappearing contours, their faces partially dissolved as if holding unspoken histories. Domestic scenes echo family snapshots yet feel subtly fractured—each figure enclosed in a private interior world. Through distortion, Vika reveals identity as unstable, emotionally charged, shaped by memory’s silences. Beneath the spectral atmosphere lies deep tenderness: small gestures and soft glances evoke fragile warmth. Her works feel excavated from the emotional archive of the self, offering intimate glimpses into vulnerability and resilience.
—Laura Acosta
Chief Curator & Creative Director, Arttyco
Written in Barcelona, December 2025
✉ info@arttyco.com | 🌐 www.arttyco.com | IG: @arttyco
Laura Acosta, combines her background in architecture, interior design, and cultural management to create accessible and engaging contemporary art experiences. Her multidisciplinary approach emphasizes spatial awareness and deep audience connection.
