Throwing knives (part 1) 1991

Oleg Holosiy made "Throwing Knives (part 1)," and the image is full of vertical thrusts. Tall, skinny palms in the foreground, and then more in the background – like stage flats receding into the distance. I can imagine Oleg there, looking out into the middle distance and trying to work out this spatial problem - how to make a painting that’s a place, and not just of a place. The trunks are so slender and simplified that they're almost like graphic marks, and there's a kind of insistent, almost naive repetition. Maybe Holosiy was thinking about someone like Henri Rousseau? Or maybe he was just feeling his way through it, trying to find something new within this limited palette of blues, greens, and browns. It is as if we are in a conversation with painters across time, and they are trying to work things out together.