Z Hand 1979

This is Oleksandr Aksinin's "Z Hand," made with who knows what—but the hand has definitely seen some action! I mean, it’s looming, monumental, almost totemic, and those colours—pink and green—they vibrate against the solid black ground. You can almost feel Aksinin working on this, building up the texture, dot by dot. It feels painstaking but also, like, meditative. I imagine him, hunched over, obsessively marking, trying to conjure a new reality. The composition, which is divided into these clean blocks, looks vaguely familiar—an homage to Soviet Constructivism, maybe? Yet, it is transformed into something deeply personal. It reminds me a little bit of Paul Klee. But where Klee is playful, Aksinin is more intense. He's wrestling with something profound, trying to ground it in the everyday. Painters, we’re always having this conversation with each other across time, borrowing, responding, pushing back. Aksinin is gone now, but this piece lives on. A strange and beautiful gesture.