Анна Каренина - Signals of Smoke -XXL

Shipping and Handling: To ensure maximum protection, the artwork is shipped rolled in a rigid cardboard tube; therefore, it is SOLD UNFRAMED AND WITHOUT A STRETCHER BAR. Upon request, the collector may arrange for the canvas to be stretched: in this case, the costs for the service and the adjusted shipping fees will be at the buyer's expense.The painting measures approximately 140 x 140 cm to allow for framing.
The certificate of authenticity will also be sent with the work.
The artwork is created on jute canvas, prepared with rabbit-skin glue and Gesso di Bologna.

TITLE: SIGNALS OF SMOKE

In Signals of Smoke, the pictorial surface is organized as a vibrant field of chromatic modules, clearly inspired by the tradition of Russian carpets, yet freed from their decorative function to become an autonomous language. The irregular grid of squares and rectangles does not construct a static order; on the contrary, it seems to oscillate, bend, and breathe. The composition is crossed by a constant tension between structure and instability, memory and transformation.
The reference to Russian carpets is not only formal, but also cultural. These artifacts, historically carriers of identity, protection, and domestic storytelling, are here dismantled and reactivated in a contemporary key. The colors—intense reds, deep blues, powdery grays, and muted pinks—evoke an archaic vocabulary, yet they are modulated with a modern, almost digital sensitivity that breaks traditional symmetry and introduces a sense of undulating movement.
The title, Signals of Smoke, suggests a communicative and symbolic dimension: the painting does not narrate directly, but sends fragmented, intermittent messages. Like smoke signals, the work speaks through allusion, rhythm, and repetition, entrusting the viewer with the task of deciphering. Chromatic variations become traces, visual impulses that move across the surface like an ancient code, not entirely translatable.
In this work, the painterly gesture retains an evident physicality: the edges are not perfect, the color fields reveal the hand, time, and error. It is precisely this controlled imperfection that makes the work alive, distant from both geometric coldness and pure decorativism. Signals of Smoke thus positions itself in an intermediate space, where textile tradition transforms into visual experience and painting becomes a site of transmission—not of certainties, but of presences, memories, and distant calls.
In this sense, the painting enters into a fertile dialogue with Russian embroidery traditions and with the broader concept of the carpet as a symbolic and cultural space. The modular square structure recalls the repetitive motifs of Russian folk textiles, particularly rural embroideries (vyshivki), where geometry is never merely decorative but charged with meaning—protection, fertility, and the cyclical nature of time. As in those works, repetition here does not produce monotony, but rather a visual rhythm based on subtle variations that render each unit unique.
The insistent use of red establishes a direct connection with Slavic culture, where this color has historically been associated with life, beauty, and the sacred (in Old Russian, krasnyj meant both “red” and “beautiful”). The blues, greens, and grays act as balancing fields, analogous to the pauses within traditional textiles that allow the composition to breathe. The small yellow inserts can be read as apotropaic signs, similar to accentuated stitches in embroidery that mark symbolic nodes or thresholds.
The reference to the carpet further expands the interpretation of the work. Like a carpet, the painting offers no central hierarchy and no privileged perspective: it is a surface to be traversed by the gaze, potentially infinite, where every point holds equal value. Historically, the carpet is a horizontal

narrative space, tied to domestic life and collective memory; likewise, this painting seems to gather fragments of time, repeated gestures, and traces of a patient, accumulative making.
From this perspective, painting approaches the act of weaving or embroidering: a slow, repetitive, almost meditative action through which meaning is built over duration. The work thus becomes a “painterly carpet,” a site of cultural and sensory stratification, where the modern language of abstraction enters into dialogue with ancient forms of knowledge, transforming the surface into a field
of memory, rhythm, and belonging.

Anna Karenina

Behind the pseudonym Анна Каренина lies an artistic figure of profound introspective sensitivity, one who has deliberately chosen shadow as a space for creative freedom. Her true identity remains concealed, protected by a veil of privacy that shifts the viewer's entire focus away from the artist's face and onto the substance of her work. This distance from the traditional art system is underscored by a specific operational choice: the artist maintains no direct ties with galleries or museums, preferring to navigate the art world through intermediaries and proxies who act as guardians of her privacy and messengers of her aesthetic.
Her visual language moves along a delicate ridge separating stylized figuration from pure abstraction, drawing heavily from the lessons of European modernism—showing a particular affinity for the rhythmic rigor of Paul Klee and the chromatic explorations of the historical avant-garde. Anna Karenina's creative path is distinguished by a constant investigation into structure: the visible world is reduced to primordial signs, where thin, elegant lines alternate with solid geometric fields. For her, the square and the rectangle are not formal cages but units of emotional measurement; her grids never appear rigid, but rather pulsating and almost organic, thanks to a color application that retains a tactile warmth and human vibration.
In her more abstract compositions, the painter explores the concept of visual rhythm. By juxtaposing chromatic tiles that float against often neutral or raw backgrounds, the artist creates visual scores where color—sometimes bright and primary, other times muted and earthy—dictates the tempo of the narrative. Even when addressing everyday subjects, she performs a process of extreme synthesis: forms are stripped of the superfluous to reveal the essence of the object, transforming common elements into icons of a poetics of fragility.
Silence and absence are fundamental components of her aesthetic. Her canvases offer a space for meditation, a place where the balance of visual weights invites a slow and solitary reading, mirroring her own way of existing within the art world. Anna Karenina does not seek the clamor of public success, but rather deep resonance; her art is a silent dialogue between the order of thought and the unpredictability of feeling, mediated by an invisibility that makes each of her chromatic appearances all the more precious and sought after.