Ilya portrays a protagonist deprived of "false face" in paintings "Without Mask 1" and "Without Mask 2". Once the social masks slip away, the personality shrouds in haze, and only its silhouette remains. Ilya raises the question of what happens to a person's identity when theyremove their social masks. However, the answer may be disappointing, as there is no longer anything left.

(c) Anna Mayskaya, Research Assistant of Anna Nova Gallery

The exhibition suggests that the “false face” is never a single layer. To put on one mask is toreach for another almost instantly, until masking becomes indistinguishable from the body’soutline that caught in the hairline, absorbed into habit. What remains can feel like an emptyvessel, a shell that reads as inhabited whether or not anything is safely present inside. Taxidermy intensifies this paradox. It preserves by building form around absence—sometimesenlarging, idealizing, or correcting the figure so the pose holds, the gesture stays dynamiceven as it is frozen. When the false face is lifted away, it does not guarantee revelation but itmay reveal only another surface and another version of “you” made legible. Idealization, too,can be a mask.

(c) Sungah Serena Choo, Independent Curator