In Time Running, Valeriya Veron returns to the world of reflective surfaces and vanity objects, this time with even greater narrative complexity and visual richness. Mirrors of every kind crowd the warm marble surface, an ornate compact open to reveal its clouded glass, a hand mirror face down reflecting the portrait of a woman from another era, larger decorative mirrors tilted at angles that catch the cosmos rather than the room. A modern faucet pours water in a clean silver arc at the left edge, the only thing in the composition still moving, still running. Cherry blossoms emerge from a marble-patterned vessel at the center, their pink blooms insisting on beauty in the midst of all this accumulated time.
Valeriya Veron paints the 18″ x 24″ canvas in oils with a mastery of surface and material that is extraordinary throughout. The warm amber and rust of the marble counter glows beneath the objects, each one casting its own quiet shadow. The portrait reflected in the hand mirror is the most poignant detail, a woman from the past looking up from a surface that now faces downward, her gaze still intact, her world long gone. Time Running deepens the meditation begun in Running Time, asking with greater urgency what it means to see ourselves in surfaces that were made to reflect us, long after the moment of looking has passed.