Games with characters 1988

Vasiliy Ryabchenko created “Games with characters” on a 90 by 85 cm canvas, and it's intriguing to imagine how this strange scene came to be. I wonder, was it through sketches or straight from the subconscious? There are these pale, elongated figures under an olive and blue sky, almost like characters in a play. And you've got this little guy sitting by an open cage – is he trapped or free? The texture is fascinating; you can almost feel the artist's hand moving the paint around, building up these characters layer by layer. There's so much that’s open to interpretation here. Ryabchenko's work reminds me a bit of early 20th-century surrealists; you can see that kind of shared curiosity about the human condition. Painting is a language, and each artist has their dialect, their own way of wrestling with the world and figuring out how to express it. And when we look at each other's paintings, we’re having this awesome conversation across time and space. It's never about the final answer, more about the questions we keep asking.