AINEKI TRAVERSO

de profundis

Opening: May 15th, 6-8PM

May 15th - June 10th, 2026

Within painting lies a forgotten memory, a dream, or other phenomena absorbed and passed over, as a death and a rebirth. The void seduces the mind or vice versa—then abstraction is born.  Every time I have said goodbye, I erased a memory and found a new compulsion. I have molded myself into a being without a name or a place, unbeholden. I never believed in god, just the body and everything within its reach. 

It is impossible to return to the same place in time, but some have the ability to make an object that contains the past, and we continue to do so compulsively. As long as we maintain this practice of making, we keep ourselves alive. Here, painting is a love letter and an elegy not only for the inevitable or for an impossible body, but for every body that could not say goodbye, for every body who could not choose their time or place. 

Referencing the eponymous text by Oscar Wilde, de profundis explores painting as both phantasm and memento mori through dreamscapes, expressions of gender ambiguity, and abstracted homages to historical paintings. This work aims to propose questions around the way we perceive ourselves and others, the consequences of our expectations, and the legacy of the painter. 

I use the rhetoric of painting to make sense of the corporeal and the terrestrial by articulating disparate familial and social narratives. I often return to the idea of a lacuna, or an unfilled space where something once existed. In my practice, it represents an absence in memory, experience, kinship, or cultural understanding. My painting confronts shapeless negative space that exists between what is legible or is able to be depicted as a recourse to the profound yearning for a place I am currently no longer able to access.  I both mourn and celebrate ancestors of the past, occurrences in the present, and events yet to come, blurring the lines between subjective reality and memory.