Freed from Hamas, former hostage tells his story through his paintings

New York: You’d be forgiven for looking around Andrei Kozlov’s studio, dotted with paintings inspired by his eight months as a hostage of Hamas, and seeing only darkness — canvases splashed with gray and ocher, guns tucked into waistbands or resting against a wall, moments of angst and disbelief and pain.

He is a free man now, who often lets a wide smile spread across his face, who can’t believe his luck of surviving it all, and who urges you to look further.

A painting of a blackened street his captors led him down is drowned in darkness, but in the distance is a sliver of cerulean sky. A screaming man’s reflection is caught, but it’s in a mirror on a bubblegum-pink wall. A house beside barren trees is seen in the desolation of night, but its windows glow with lamplight.

“When you’re surrounded by something dark,” the 28-year-old Kozlov says, standing in a shared art studio he works at in the Hudson Yards neighbourhood of New York, “there always can be light inside”. Nearly a year after his release from captivity, Kozlov is familiar with juxtapositions.