Clown Dance 1978

Oleksandr Aksinin made this small painting, Clown Dance, using watercolour and ink to create a grid of bizarre images. The colours are bright, but muddied, like old circus posters, with the confident lines of an architectural plan overlaid on top. I like how Aksinin embraces the slightly awkward and amateurish nature of the medium. Take the image in the centre: a green-faced clown with bulging biceps wearing a red cummerbund and an expression that could either be smiling or grimacing. The thick black outlines and the flat colour give it a cartoonish feel, but the strange details – are those tattoos on his arms? And what's with the floating red disc? – elevate it to something more unsettling. It reminds me of Philip Guston's later work – that same willingness to embrace the crude and the ugly, to create images that are both funny and deeply disturbing. Art is a conversation, after all, a way of talking to each other across time and space through marks and gestures. In this painting, Aksinin invites us to join the conversation, to bring our own interpretations and find our own meaning in his strange and wonderful world.