Isolation has become one of the hot art topics during COVID. These couple of years forced everyone to experience things they'd never planned to. But the post-COVID reality never excluded this theme from visual art. It gave it some new research angles that made it more interesting.

Lidiya Ladyzhina's "Don't Leave Your Room" piece is a great example of this theme: the artist creates a vivid image of inner isolation. Her heroine lives in two worlds at the same time. Our physical world is quite easy to spot – she wanders around her apartment in a two-colored jacket which refers to the dual-reality concept of the video. The virtual environment Ladyzhina's character lives in is being demonstrated through an old Disney cartoon fragment where Mickey Mouse walks out of the mirror. This tells us a story of a twisted connection between the real girl and her observed avatar that leaves in a peculiar black-and-white reality.

As a matter of fact, the black and white coloring became very important for those artists who work with the theme of loneliness and isolation. Polina Nekliudova's creative work is great proof of it. Her artist's "handwriting" can be easily recognized by the search for shapes and textures in her photography. In her practice, she searches for something essential, which is very hard to see beyond all the noise and distractions of daily life. In her "Somebody Else" piece she demonstrates an anonymous portrait, a simulacrum of a person. Seeing that as a viewer one can decide for themselves which features the character's face have and etc. In some sense, Nekliudova offers us to look into the mirror of our own soul which will definitely show us all the hidden parts that we prefer to keep to ourselves.

Helena Boutko's blurry monochromatic images give us an impression of some sort of delusion one can experience. This refers to the theme of isolation that was mentioned above. Similarly to Nekliudova, Boutko creates an illusionary reality her viewer may fall into emotionally. In this reality anything may happen – figurative images can transform into something only a Surrealist mind is able to come up with. Saying a metaphorical "no" to other colors gives the artist an opportunity to communicate with her spectators via the enormous number of shades her images have.

So here we are, in this post-COVID reality looking at black-and-white art pieces that take our mind to a different reality where it finds its own isolated island.