The Barefoot Boy

In Irinka Talakhadze’s new paintings, figures float weightlessly in water, suspended between memory and metaphor. These dreamlike scenes, drawn from personal family imagery, evoke the intimacy of childhood moments—carefree, tender, and tactile—while also conjuring a surreal, almost mythical atmosphere. The water becomes a threshold: both a literal setting of familial closeness and a symbolic space of transformation, vulnerability, and suspended time. In capturing the fluidity of childhood and memory, Talakhadze’s work invites us to linger in the in-between—where past and present, real and imagined, gently blur.