Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards
Photography by Dominique Croshaw
Photography by Dominique Croshaw
Photography by Dominique Croshaw
Photography by Deniz Nell Guzel
Photography by Deniz Nell Guzel
Hover
Solo show
Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal
22nd January – 7th March, 2026
Bradley Ertaskiran is delighted to present Hover, a solo exhibition by London-based artist Sonya Derviz, featuring a new body of paintings that embrace the potential of uncertainty.
At first glance, Derviz’s amorphous abstractions appear effortless and unstructured, as if conjured out of thin air. Yet their captivating ethereality—the result of countless overlaid traces—reveals a laborious and strategic method that doesn’t make visibility its priority. Reference images are intuitively assembled as quiet guides for the overall composition, chosen not for their representational clarity but for their ability to ignite a scene before receding from view. The paintings’ underpinnings are also charted in charcoal, only to be concealed by the painting’s completion. Over this, Derviz develops layer upon layer of semitransparent oil paint, building unbound worlds in painted form. The accumulation of these translucent surfaces both structures the painting and leaves room for chance encounters. From this shifting ground emerge weighty masses and wispy shadows—forms that appear to mutate in response to their surroundings. Derviz masters a range of atmospheric effects, producing a disorienting coexistence of heaviness and air.
In a moment that privileges the hyper-visible—when overly-saturated images proliferate endlessly, collapsing distinctions between the real and the fabricated—Derviz’s paintings affirm the value of what remains unseen. Painting has long been a vehicle for illusion, yet here, illusion is not a spectacle of deception but a slow, attentive process that cultivates productive, poetic uncertainty, about both what we see and how we inhabit the world. Faces and figures hover on the brink of recognition. Is a face still a face when it is untethered to a known identity? Derviz’s scenes do not provide answers; in refusing the comfort of precision and legibility, and prioritizing opacity over exposure, the work questions the assumption that visibility equates to truth, suggesting instead that ambiguity offers space for reflection, attentiveness, and wonder.
Derviz’s hazy scenes are steeped in both suspicion and curiosity, as if something is unfolding just beyond our immediate view. Confronted with this state of not-knowing—of not-seeing—we experience discomfort; we yearn for clarity, to sift through the gauzy film for something direct and uncomplicated to hold onto. Yet the paintings’ lack of guidance is bewildering and ultimately humbling, a reminder that precision and coherence are not irrefutable indicators of reality. Derviz creates works that reward sustained looking, particularly for those willing to search without knowing exactly what they are looking for.
Conditions
Sonya Derviz and Joel Wycherley
Soft Commodity at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ
6th – 28th June, 2025
“Most likely.” “Quite possibly.” “I would imagine.” When we mention post-truth, we’re normally thinking about lies. But we are equally scared of vagueness. We look for something precise and reliable, but elusion and evasion leave us with little to hang our hats on.
Some think of art as a sort of crystallisation: thousands of possibilities in the form of ideas and impressions, distilled into a single image or object. The artist, a sort of alchemist, turns all that might be into something that is. The artwork stands sentinel as a definite object, an answer to the many questions that haunted its creation. Finally, solid ground.
Not here. Neither Sonya Derviz nor Joel Wycherley deal in truths. They deal in the almost-true, probably-true, maybe-true and ostensibly-true. In their work, vagueness is understood not as a distorting force but as a necessary condition of our experience of the world.
In making ambiguity a central underpinning of their work, both artists reveal the possibility of solid ground to be spurious. We seek comfort in knowledge, in the feeling that we have a reliable lay of the land. Always, to a lesser or greater extent, this is illusory. Indeed, we are at our worst when acting on the feeling that we understand something that we really don’t. Derviz and Wycherley place us into the centre of a narrative that, paradoxically, speaks truth precisely because of its lack of a declaration.
Wycherley builds physical lenses through which we glimpse a mediated version of what might lie beyond them. Sometimes a carved wood eyeball, sometimes a ripe lemon, sometimes an emptiness in disguise. Portal-like in scale and covering two opposing walls, his heavy structures seem to become architectural features of the space. Displayed as such – as conditions of the environment itself rather than discrete objects – they quietly animate the room, making it hum with the feeling that what we’re looking at might not be what it seems.
Between these pane-structures is Derviz’s painting. It contains a composite figure inspired by a number of found images but ultimately unanswerable to any of them. Her characters are constructed in the process of painting them, and therefore don’t exist outside of the paintings. This is a figment whose world extends no further than the edges of the canvas, where she hovers in a suspended state. Derviz’s intentional openness reframes ambiguity as defiant and bold; a mode of figuration that finds a truth beyond traditional ideas of representation.
The artists share an understanding of their subjects as essentially unknowable. Something is here, but exactly what is, by design, unclear. We circle it, we glimpse it occasionally, but never in a full and comprehensive form – because it doesn’t have one. Nothing is crystalised, nothing is clearly stated or conveyed; what looks like one thing could easily be its opposite. Laughter might really be tears.
Relaying little about their subjects, both artists tell us much about perception and experience itself. Each in their own way, they reflect the way that we see and understand the world back to us. When we look, it’s always through a lens of some kind, even if only the heavy gauze of our own physical hardware. When we dream or remember, we see faces that are amalgamations of those that we encounter in waking life.
These three works constitute an environment, a condition. The room that contains them is heavy with the sense that something meaningful is happening here, but not in plain sight. It’s somewhere, just around the corner, perhaps, just behind the glass, flickering in someone’s eye. It won’t present itself to us readily – but what real thing would?
– Phin Jennings
Photography by Dominique Croshaw
Derviz almost exclusively employs charcoal to make these drawings. It is among the most pictorial of drawing mediums, enabling a sheer variety of effects—ranging from precise lines to atmospheric fields—depending on the pressure applied onto the paper. Charcoal possesses both the acute delicacy of fine mechanical pencils and the painterly beauty characteristic of the ways oil paint bleeds. Charcoal demands a heightened physical engagement with the act of drawing, which often continues after the stick is set aside. The marks it leaves beg to be spread with a finger.
Derviz embraces charcoal’s corporeal dimensions and conceives of drawing almost as a recording instrument. The seemingly finished works bear the imprint of her hands’ movements across the surface, set in motion by the motifs she captures. Her drawings embody empathic networks of intuition and feeling fostered by her being in the world. Beneath the recognisable elements she renders—branches, foliage, trunks—her drawings’ fundamental subjects emerge, manifesting the interstices that escape fixed forms. Derviz uses her free and thinking hands to open the visible world, metamorphosing matter into transfigured forms, to paraphrase the French art historian Henri Focillon’s In Praise of Hands.
The four paintings Derviz presents in this exhibition translate into painting the meditative rigour of her draughtsmanship. Throughout their making, she returns repeatedly to charcoal even while working in oil, using it to find her bearings and maintain sound compositions. It is as though she incrementally transfers charcoal from paper to linen, from drawing to painting. Each layer brings her closer to the works we see now. Her constructive method reads as deconstructive: the paintings collapse the appearance of her drawings through their own pictorial means. Within the boundaries of each canvas, her charcoal additions, now buried under layers of oil paint, remain faintly visible. They activate the vibrations of Derviz’s hand-driven memories. Her movements subtly resurface through them. If her drawings gently perspire with these remembrances, it is with paint that she fully embraces them.
The paintings give form to the drawings’ roots. Derviz’s aesthetic attitude yields a pictorial realm where forms are revealed through their essence, where outlines no longer serve as primary definitions and contours become irrelevant. Her paintings daze us into a perceptual state where the world has not
yet solidified into photographic legibility, a metaphor echoed in the title of one of her works, The sun turning into water. As Kazimir Malevich writes in a text Derviz often returns to, ‘An Analysis of New and Imitative Art’, she ‘mak[es] [us] experience the reality of [her paintings] at [their] given moment [in time]’. By creating unbound forms, Derviz imbues painting itself with living perception.
— Théo de Luca
Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards