Elize Sokolova : What to do before the apocalypse?

In her latest series, presented in the solo exhibition "What to do before the apocalypse?", Elize Sokolova (France, 1997) explores, with a light and satirical touch, the ways in which we respond to the instability and chaos of the present. The project considers our tendency to seek pleasure, distraction, and normality while turning away from collective crises. Rather than treating these impulses simply as indifference, the works leave room for ambiguity: distraction, carelessness, and resistance to change can appear as symptoms of denial, but also, at times, as coping mechanisms necessary to preserve our mental well-being.

Play, fire, and overconsumption recur throughout the series. Their coexistence creates a tension between apparent lightness and irreversible destruction, placing pleasure and danger within the same pictorial space. Suffering is transformed into spectacle or abstraction, producing an emotional distance from realities that might otherwise feel overwhelming.

Through this tension between amusement and anxiety, Sokolova reflects on a distinctly contemporary condition: the desire to continue living, enjoying, and consuming even as crisis becomes part of everyday life. Humour and absurdity do not neutralise the darker implications of the works; instead, they become tools through which those contradictions can be confronted.

Elize Sokolova is a painter living and working in Brussels. Her practice is rooted in figurative painting, drawing on surrealism, symbolism, and the visual language of contemporary image culture. Trained in photography and graphic design, she brings a strong sense of composition and image construction to paintings that blur the boundaries between everyday reality, imagination, and the absurd.

Through vivid colour, altered proportions, and unexpected encounters between figures and objects, Sokolova creates scenes that are at once familiar and unsettling. Humour and visual seduction often provide an entry point into works that explore more ambiguous psychological and social tensions, from individual anxieties to broader contradictions within contemporary life.