Duplication as Disruption and the Poetics of Near Symmetry

The exhibition Vector Fields by Ekaterina Lazareva at Atticus Art Gallery in Bath does not offer the viewer an image so much as a condition: a fragile network of vectors stretched across architectural space, simultaneously restraining and releasing the gaze. From the outset, what seems like a minimal geometric intervention – taut red filaments drawn across the corner of the gallery – reveals itself as a meditation on the instability of resemblance, the generative friction of duplication, and the poetics of near symmetry.

Lazareva’s practice has long moved between painting and installation, between surface and spatial field. Her paintings operate through layers of translucent pigment over darkened grounds, hovering between presence and erasure, while her installations transpose this precarious dialectic into three dimensions. What unites both media is a sustained attention to the doubled form – the diptych, the mirrored yet divergent gesture, the line that repeats without resolving. In Vector Fields, the doubled line finds its fullest spatial articulation: each thread echoes another, creating a grid that appears symmetrical from a distance, yet fractures into deviation as the body moves around it.

The viewer enters a choreography of disruption. What looks stable is unsettled with each shift of perspective; what seems like repetition discloses difference. The duplication of lines across the gallery’s corner is never pure repetition but a subtle fracturing that generates instability. Here Lazareva reveals how the nearly symmetrical contains within it the seeds of radical divergence. It is not the perfect mirror that matters, but the hesitation between almost and not-quite, the delicate asymmetry that refuses to resolve into identity.

The corner of the gallery becomes the hinge of this experience. Often ignored as a structural seam, the corner in Vector Fields becomes the site where near symmetry asserts itself: two planes converging, two directions mirroring each other but never fully aligning. The filaments radiating from this junction enact a poetics of interruption – they duplicate, diverge, and create a field of tension that the viewer cannot escape. The corner is thus not a limit but a point of proliferation, generating vectors that reorder the entire room.

The formal logic of Lazareva’s work finds an unexpected analogue in the mosaic traditions of Moroccan mosques, particularly the practice of zellige and girih patterning. In Islamic art, infinite repetition of geometric modules is not simply decorative but metaphysical: it gestures towards the ungraspable, towards unity through multiplicity. Yet what gives these mosaics their vitality is not mechanical repetition but subtle disruption. Each tessera is part of a greater whole, but small deviations and irregularities animate the field, producing a shimmer that unsettles perfect symmetry. The eye wanders between the sense of an infinite continuum and the recognition of difference at the local level.

Lazareva’s Vector Fields can be read through this lens. Her threads, like the tesserae of a Moroccan courtyard, create a field that is neither strictly symmetrical nor entirely chaotic. The repeated lines build a lattice that promises order, but as one moves around the installation, differences accumulate: angles shift, shadows multiply, and the symmetry dissolves into instability. What the mosaics achieve through coloured stone, Lazareva achieves with fragile thread and shadow – both forms relying on the logic of the fragment, the unit that repeats without ever attaining perfect closure.

Yet there is also a divergence between the two. Moroccan mosque mosaics embed the faithful within an architecture of infinity, a metaphysical field in which the human subject is absorbed into a divine order. Lazareva, by contrast, stages a phenomenology of fragility: rather than infinite stability, she proposes provisional relation. Her near-symmetries insist on contingency, reminding the viewer not of a transcendent order but of the instability of belonging in a fractured world. Where the mosque mosaic reconciles the multiple into the One, Lazareva’s vectors suspend the One in favour of a fragile many.

This tension between symmetry and disruption is political as well as formal. Born in the USSR and now based between Cyprus and the United Kingdom, Lazareva inhabits the condition of displacement, her biography marked by rupture and reconfiguration. The duplication of lines across fractured space becomes an allegory of this condition: an attempt to sustain relation across division, to hold together what has been split. Yet the work resists nostalgia for lost wholeness. Instead, it dwells in the unsettled space of near-symmetry, where belonging is provisional and relation is possible only through the acknowledgement of fracture.

Philosophically, the work resonates with Derrida’s notion of différance, where meaning emerges not in identity but in delay, displacement, and the play of repetition that never stabilises. Gilles Deleuze’s account of repetition as transformation rather than sameness also comes to the fore: in Vector Fields, each filament repeats the gesture of another, yet the accumulation generates not closure but divergence. The installation is less a static geometry than a dynamic field of becoming, where duplication functions as disruption.

This disruption is also bodily. The viewer cannot stand outside the work; the taut red lines demand orientation, require the body to adjust and realign. The instability of near symmetry becomes phenomenological: one senses with the body that relation is contingent, that perception is always at risk of undoing. In this way, Lazareva recalls Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on embodied perception, while also extending it into an ethics: to perceive fragility not as weakness but as the very condition of relationality.

The poetics of near symmetry in Vector Fields thus operates on multiple registers – formal, spatial, philosophical, and biographical. The duplication of lines disrupts rather than stabilises; the nearly symmetrical refuses identity; the fragile filaments hold space in tension. The viewer is left with an acute awareness that relation emerges not from solidity or exact correspondence, but from the fragile, the provisional, and the almost.

In an era saturated with demands for clarity, unity, and closure – whether in political identity, national borders, or cultural narratives – Lazareva’s work insists on the necessity of the unresolved. In dialogue with traditions such as Moroccan mosaic, which deploys repetition to gesture towards infinity, Vector Fields insists on the opposite: that it is precisely in disruption, in the fracture of near symmetry, that the possibility of relation and the ethics of attention are found.

Vector Fields by Ekaterina Lazareva

14 September – 28 October 2023

Venue: Atticus Art Gallery, 11a Queen Street, BA1 1HE, Bath, United Kingdom

www.atticusgallery.co.uk

Tom Denman, residing in London, is a distinguished freelance art critic whose perceptive articles have featured in eminent publications such as Art Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtReview, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, e-flux, Flash Art, Ocula, and Studio International. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading, focusing his research on Caravaggio and the noble-intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Naples. Presently, his critiques primarily explore the subtleties and emerging trends within contemporary art.