ROMA SOYEROV
'Soft Skill'
Year: 2025, Medium: Acrylic on canvas, AR, Dimensions: 80 × 70 cm, First shown: PROPAGANDA, Ilkhom Theatre, Tashkent, 2025, Viewing the AR: No app to download. Point any smartphone camera through the link provided at the work: an animation shows the top layer cutting away, revealing the full painted scene underneath, the man and the complete blue elephant.
Overview
Fragments of reality, pulled out of their familiar context. One half holds saturated color, texture, motion, a moment caught mid-air. The other is emptiness: an erased surface, a hint of disappearance.
The canvas itself is split this way: one half dense with warm, worked paint, the other nearly bare and grey. A man's face and a rounded blue form break across the seam between them, visible only where the two surfaces meet.
Where does the border between image and emptiness sit? Can a picture ever be whole again, or is loss simply part of how we see.
Fragments of reality, pulled out of their familiar context. One half holds saturated color, texture, motion, a moment caught mid-air. The other is emptiness: an erased surface, a hint of disappearance.
The canvas itself is split this way: one half dense with warm, worked paint, the other nearly bare and grey. A man's face and a rounded blue form break across the seam between them, visible only where the two surfaces meet.
Where does the border between image and emptiness sit? Can a picture ever be whole again, or is loss simply part of how we see.
The method behind PROPAGANDA
Every work in the series is built in the same sequence. First, a complete figurative scene is painted in full, resolved as its own finished image. It's photographed before anything happens to it. Then it's concealed: painted over with an abstract layer, sometimes fully, sometimes leaving fragments exposed, depending on what the piece needs. A narrative is worked out for what the concealed layer will say once revealed. That narrative is animated, using the photographed original as source material, and activated through AR: a viewer's phone becomes the only way back to the image underneath.
What changes from piece to piece is how much survives the concealment, and what relationship the visible surface has to what's hidden beneath it. In Soft Skill, fragments stay exposed at the seam between the two zones of the canvas; other works in the series conceal the full scene.
What changes from piece to piece is how much survives the concealment, and what relationship the visible surface has to what's hidden beneath it. In Soft Skill, fragments stay exposed at the seam between the two zones of the canvas; other works in the series conceal the full scene.
From the interview
When HILL magazine asked what's actually happening in the painting, not the art critic's reading, but his own, Soyerov described a man carrying an elephant on his back, hidden so completely that it reads as something soft and rounded, like a sofa cushion. The blue comes from a personal reference: a set of ceramic chess pieces he made, where the elephant piece is blue. The title itself came from nowhere deeper than how the words sounded together: "soft" for the shape, and for the way the blue material melts and flows across his shoulders rather than sitting rigid; "skill" for the idea of training into strength.
Once the painting was shown, it kept collecting readings that outgrew his own. One visitor connected it to a folk tale she knew: a girl who carried a kid goat every day and grew strong at exactly the pace the goat grew heavy. He's said he likes that reading more than the one he started with. It's a variation on an old motif: the Greek wrestler Milo of Croton was said to have built his strength the same way, carrying a calf every day until it grew into a bull.
At the exhibition, the painting held some of the closest attention in the room, much of it visitors trying to work out exactly what the blue shape was.
When HILL magazine asked what's actually happening in the painting, not the art critic's reading, but his own, Soyerov described a man carrying an elephant on his back, hidden so completely that it reads as something soft and rounded, like a sofa cushion. The blue comes from a personal reference: a set of ceramic chess pieces he made, where the elephant piece is blue. The title itself came from nowhere deeper than how the words sounded together: "soft" for the shape, and for the way the blue material melts and flows across his shoulders rather than sitting rigid; "skill" for the idea of training into strength.
Once the painting was shown, it kept collecting readings that outgrew his own. One visitor connected it to a folk tale she knew: a girl who carried a kid goat every day and grew strong at exactly the pace the goat grew heavy. He's said he likes that reading more than the one he started with. It's a variation on an old motif: the Greek wrestler Milo of Croton was said to have built his strength the same way, carrying a calf every day until it grew into a bull.
At the exhibition, the painting held some of the closest attention in the room, much of it visitors trying to work out exactly what the blue shape was.