At the lake 1990

Oleg Holosiy made this mural-sized painting, At the lake, with oils, on what looks like two panels. It’s all beachy blues, umbers, and ochres, and I just imagine Holosiy working on the floor, sloshing paint around, making marks, wiping them away, and then doing it all over again. The layering of blue figures across the diptych suggests they were maybe added in later, after the initial landscape was laid down. I get the feeling that, for Holosiy, painting was a way of figuring things out, a process of trial, error, and maybe some intuition. Those figures remind me of Picasso, maybe, and all the bathers Cezanne painted. It’s like Holosiy is in conversation with painting’s history, remixing the past with his own approach. Painting is this ongoing conversation, you know? Artists build on what came before, argue with it, and make something new. And maybe that’s what Holosiy was doing here—not just depicting a scene, but thinking through painting itself.