Untitled 2022

Curator: This "Untitled" work is an acrylic painting by Kateryna Lysovenko, completed in 2022, exhibiting features of modernism while hinting at figuration and exploring the nude. What are your first thoughts? Editor: My immediate impression is a somber dreamscape. The figures floating in the dark blue call to mind both intimacy and alienation, a curious coupling made even more apparent by the application of thin paint on what seems to be raw canvas. Curator: It definitely has a dreamlike quality, almost a mirrored reflection. The ochre and sienna tones are very earthly but contrasted against the darkness it reads quite beautifully, wouldn’t you say? There's this real dance of weightlessness. Do you find a grounded-ness in the earthiness of the colors? Editor: I’m fascinated by the raw materiality and simple tools employed here. It feels almost like a rehearsal for something larger. Acrylic on canvas from an artist, the labor isn't necessarily about refinement or illusion. Look at the production: The visible canvas creates this layered effect and emphasizes, paradoxically, a kind of constructed "natural" beauty. What is natural, here? The nudity or its depiction through obviously artificial means? Curator: It's funny, isn’t it? This contrast. The figures themselves seem simplified, but not simple. Like outlines of something intensely felt, something profoundly internal. Are they rising or falling? Editor: It's hard to say. Perhaps they represent figures struggling through a dark material world. Their embrace signifies more a connection formed through struggle, through shared labor. Or maybe simply through making, through art as an act. Curator: Lysovenko often explores vulnerable and quite frankly human states of being through figuration. There’s almost a narrative pull despite the stillness. A very modern dance between exposure and… is it protection, perhaps? Editor: Interesting way of putting it, because these "vulnerable" nude figures really emphasize for me not fragility but material connection through visible human making in Lysovenko's chosen processes. That embrace shows how we are formed through material circumstances. It’s an almost anti-Romantic take. Curator: An act of raw empathy or, to borrow your sentiment, “material connection,” in pigment, perhaps? Thank you, that's certainly changed my perspective. Editor: It goes to show what a closer consideration of materiality and the human making can do for an image.