Neutral Zone by Maria Koroleva

Neutral Zone is a site-responsive series created in 2023–2024 in Thailand. Developed within an abandoned villa on an island, theproject exists in a state of transition — between construction and ruin. Here, in a space stripped of function, the artist engaged with industrial materials, experimenting with solvents, sandpaper, sponges, and blades, approachingpainting as an act of erasure.

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Rather than building form, the artist removes and dissolves, allowing the canvas to register traces of time and exposure. Layers of paint are burned away by the sun, washed out by rain, or chemically destabilized, revealing surfaces caught between becoming and vanishing. What remains is an imprint, a residue of an environment in flux.

The house itself became a total installation, and the artist’s practice mimicked its slow decay. The act of painting merged with the villa’s transformation, synchronizing with its surfaces. The cracked walls, stained by humidity, them old blooming across once-uniform coatings, the spray-painted lines along thefloor and walls, the silt settling on plastic water lilies — these interventions were not imposed but emerged as extensions of the space’s own logic. The house and the paintings existed together, absorbing time equally.

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For a year, the artist lived within this environment, allowing the space to shape the rhythm of creation. The final gesture — an exhibition staged in the villa, unseen by anyone — became the ultimate expression of absence. A show without an audience, an archive of dissolution.

Neutral Zone is a dialogue with emptiness — a process of clearing, undoing, and leaving behind only the fragile evidence of time.

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