ONE MUST IMAGINE ANASTASIA SHULMAN HAPPY
I once found myself staring at Giotto’s Madonna and the Child (1320), projected onto a lecture theatre screen. Along the edges of the Virgin’s robe ran a band of gold script, its angular lines curling into one another, beautiful and impossible to read. I didn’t know medieval Arabic, of course – and assumed that was the problem.
It wasn’t, apparently: in fact, Giotto couldn’t read it either, no one ever could. The script was pseudo-Kufic: an imitation of Arabic calligraphy borrowed for its visual appeal rather than its meaning. The letters looked as though they had something to say, yet they didn’t.
I remember finding this funny. All that careful golden ornament, and no message to uncover. Just the shape of one. And our instinct to search for meaning in marks that may never have been intended to yield it.
Photography courtesy of Ekaterina (Katya) Shikhova
Well, it was years ago now, and honestly I had little reason to think about pseudo-Kufic again since. Until recently, when I walked into Anastasia Shulman’s (b. 2003) studio, looking at works that seemed to operate on a similar premise. From a distance, Shulman’s paintings offer the reassuring geometry of colour-field abstraction. Rectangles of ultramarine, rust and green divide the surfaces into something approaching an orderly composition. It is only upon closer inspection that the order begins to misbehave. Along the edges, small marks accumulate in rows, repeated with the stubbornness of a hand filling a page, resembling fragments of a script – written too many times to remember what it was supposed to say. Here, the eye encounters something that looks like writing, and so naturally you expect a message to emerge. But it doesn't.
The resemblance ends there, of course. Giotto’s imitation of script was an ornament, a borrowed language stripped of its words. Shulman’s marks are something else: the residue of hours spent making them, one stroke at a time. They are neither quite letters, nor entirely abstract gestures. Individually, they amount to very little; together, they acquire the density of a painted surface. Gazing at them, I found myself wondering: at what point does the act of writing cease to resemble writing at all? How many times must one repeat a mark before it becomes a colour? And, of course, the question from my encounter with the Madonna's painted robe still lingered: what is it about the appearance of writing that makes us so certain there must be something to read?
Anastasia Shulman, Posters, 2024
These questions took on a different dimension as I leafed through Shulman’s sketchbooks: pages upon pages of marks, arranged in rows, crossed out, occasionally swallowed by colour. Hurried notes of an exceptionally distracted student. Yet what struck me most was the sheer quantity. Whatever those cryptic marks were supposed to say, Shulman had spent an extraordinary amount of time saying it.
Anastasia Shulman, How much paper and time would it take to use up a third of a graphite stick?, 2023
In 2023, she made a work titled How much of an A2 sheet would it take to use up red pencil? The answer, supplied with admirable economy, was this much. Another experiment posed the same question to a stick of brown pastel. Elsewhere, she recorded how long it took to exhaust a third of a graphite stick. Three hours, apparently. Some serious endurance art!
There is something wonderfully absurd about these exercises. They take perfectly ordinary artistic instruments and subject them to questions nobody particularly needed answered. A pencil is generally understood as a means to an end: one uses it to draw something, write something, communicate something. Shulman reverses the arrangement. The pencil’s exhaustion itself becomes the objective, and the drawing is what happens along the way.
Anastasia Shulman, How much paper would it take to use up a stick of brown pastel?, 2023
I thought of Hanne Darboven (1941–2009), a German conceptual artist, whose vast accumulations of handwritten numbers and notations turned the passing of time into something almost architectural. For Darboven, writing could become a system through which time was recorded, organised and made visible. Shulman’s approach is less mathematical, more stubbornly physical. She does not appear especially concerned with counting the hours so much as discovering what those hours look like once they’ve passed through her hand.
All this rather unnecessary labour brought to mind another enthusiast of seemingly pointless repetition: Sisyphus.
In Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the unfortunate protagonist is condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder uphill, only to watch it roll back down again. A rather cruel arrangement, considering that the task offers neither completion nor the satisfaction of having accomplished anything at all. Yet Camus finds something unexpectedly hopeful in this predicament. If Sisyphus recognises the absurdity of his condition and continues regardless, the labour becomes, in some sense, his own. Hence the essay's famous conclusion: one must imagine Sisyphus happy
.
Anastasia Shulman, sketches produced in development of ‘recto’ and ‘verso’, 2026
Of course, Shulman is not condemned to fill sheets of paper. She chooses to do so. Nor does her labour disappear each time she reaches the end of a page. The drawings remain, accumulating into a material record of time spent. But there is a similarly peculiar relationship between effort and reward. No revelation awaits at the bottom of the pencil. No hidden sentence emerges from the repetition. The activity becomes, in a sense, its own justification.
I wondered whether Shulman, too, might find something liberating in all this repetition. There is a comforting idea that monotonous activity allows the mind to settle: the hand finds its rhythm, the thoughts quieten, and somewhere along the way one achieves a flow state approaching meditation. At least, that was what I had imagined.
"It is kind of hectic, as hectic as any meditative process goes," Shulman told me when I asked what happens to her thoughts during these long sessions – not quite the serenity I had expected.
Although the process is intended to be grounding, her mind tends to wander in unpredictable directions, eventually settling into a particular train of thought or state of mind. Sometimes the outcome is positive, sometimes decidedly less so. And since each painting is constructed over multiple sessions, the finished surface contains what she describes as a multitude of different ‘attitudes.’
I liked the thought of this. A painting that appears so carefully organised might, in fact, contain several days' worth of entirely contradictory feelings. None of them announces itself. The marks offer no indication of the state of mind in which they were made. Whatever was passing through the artist’s head remains as inaccessible to the viewer as the words we keep expecting to find.
She admits that repetition tends to make her more anxious, rather than less. The writing, she explains, is nonsensical, but it is never entirely free. Its movements are confined within the painting's multiple frames of colour, and the tension of working within those boundaries gradually spreads into her thinking. This made me reconsider the apparent order of her compositions: those great blocks of colour, which initially seemed to offer a kind of visual stability, now appeared to impose a rather different discipline. The marks continue, one after another, but always within prescribed limits. The hand keeps moving, though there is only so far it can go.
Perhaps Sisyphus wasn't having such a wonderful time after all.
Then again, I had spent the better part of an afternoon trying to read paintings that contained no words. I wasn't entirely sure which of us had undertaken the more absurd task.
