We are turning our route to SETAREH gallery. The group exhibition titled “The Blue of Distance”, which will run until 17 April 2026, takes its name from Rebecca Solnit’s famous essay. For Solnit, blue is not merely a colour; it is a metaphor for longing, for the horizon lines that shape desire, and for everything that moves further away the closer we get. This exhibition invites us precisely to that point — to the distance we can only observe but never possess.
The Silent Dance of Presence and Withdrawal: Mary Herbert
Mary Herbert captures the spirit of the exhibition from the very first moment with her patient and careful distance toward drawing and painting. Herbert’s works feel like spaces of figures and gestures that are about to turn into objects and then suddenly withdraw. The artist allows what is present and what is left absent to speak at the same time. What a barely visible trace in a painting can make us feel is sometimes far more powerful than a complete portrait. While questioning how absence shapes presence, Herbert leaves the viewer alone with the quiet tension of things that are “almost there”.
Intimate Paintings of Solitude: Junyi Lu
Junyi Lu constructs highly intimate paintings where longing and solitude coexist. In her works, personal narratives transform into surreal and tactile worlds, turning distance into something both experienced and contemplated. There is a strange clarity in Lu’s scenes: separation is held at a gentle distance, and here alienation and tenderness share the same space. In Lu’s brushwork, the viewer finds a melancholy that feels both very close and unreachable.
The Afterimage of a Remembered Garden: Sophie Smorczewski
Sophie Smorczewski’s paintings feel like the afterimage of a remembered garden lingering behind our eyelids. Working with self-made pigments and materials that oxidise and change over time, the artist allows the surfaces to record a slow transformation. These paintings create the effect that the colour itself has been exposed to the weather. The melancholic warmth Smorczewski creates finds emotion not inside the object, but in the uncertain space lingering around it.
A Journey from the Ordinary to the Uncanny: Elizaveta Zalieva
Elizaveta Zalieva moves between images and installations, gently transforming the everyday into something slightly uncanny. Zalieva’s practice explores how memory and myths accumulate around ordinary objects, and how small, repeated signs can open up into vast inner geographies. It is here that the associative distance Solnit speaks of comes alive: meaning is formed not in the things themselves, but in the empty space between them.
These four artists (Herbert, Lu, Smorczewski, and Zalieva) trace different dimensions of “The Blue of Distance”. They whisper to us that distance is not an emptiness, but rather a fertile ground where memory and possibility stand side by side. Each offers a careful perspective at those loaded moments where seeing pauses and feeling begins — that point where light has travelled far enough to turn blue.
