Niovi Kafantari, The Necessary Other

‘The Necessary Other’ marks Niovi Kafantari's first solo exhibition in London, bringing together a new body of work that explores one of the most enduring questions of human experience: how identity is shaped through encounter.

Taking its title from Adriana Cavarero's philosophy of relational identity, the exhibition proposes that the self is never formed in isolation but comes into being through the presence, memory and gaze of another. Rather than illustrating this proposition, Kafantari uses painting as a means of testing it, allowing each canvas to become a site where intimacy, vulnerability and ambiguity remain unresolved.

At the heart of her practice is a sustained investigation into the body—not as a vehicle for narrative or portraiture, but as a physical and emotional structure shaped by pressure, proximity and dependence. Figures lean, embrace, support or resist one another; gestures remain suspended between tenderness and possession, care and conflict. Drawing upon archaeology, cinema, theatre, literature and art history, Kafantari absorbs these sources, transforming them until their original narratives dissolve.

This approach is evident throughout the exhibition. In Just Met, the dramatic energy of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne survives not as recognisable iconography but as the unstable sensation of a first encounter, where identities have yet to settle. A Pastoral Fragment similarly draws upon an encounter with Michaelina Wautier's The Triumph of Bacchus, distilling the historical painting into an exploration of desire, power and vulnerability. In Last Tango, two figures hold in an embrace that refuses certainty, suggesting attraction and withdrawal simultaneously, while Married, a second time reflects on the body as a repository of memory, allowing gesture and colour to carry emotional experience beyond autobiography.

The apparent spontaneity of Kafantari's brushwork conceals a deeply considered construction. Trained as a sculptor, she builds her paintings through mass, treating paint as a material capable of conveying physical presence as much as visual description. Figures emerge only partially from the surface, forms dissolve into loose passages of colour, and the image is often left deliberately open. This unfinished quality preserves the painting's capacity to remain alive, resisting definitive interpretation in favour of possibility. ‘The Necessary Other’ reminds us that meaning is not discovered in certainty but in relation, where every encounter has the potential to generate another way of seeing.