Evening (colour insert from Abracadabra) 2019

Pavlo Makov made this painting, Evening, which includes a color insert from his series, Abracadabra. The plant is a weird one. It’s growing out of a building, or maybe through it? Either way, it's got these delicate roots reaching down, as if tapping into the city’s hidden circuits. The texture of the orange background is broken up, like it's stained or distressed. It reminds me of some old fresco peeling off a wall. Look at the blossom at the top. It’s made up of tiny boxes, like little apartments all lit up at night. It's such an uncanny image. It resonates with me because it’s about nature and technology, and that’s what art is, too, right? It’s about making connections and building new worlds out of whatever’s at hand. You could say that Makov's work shares something with Piranesi's, as they both use architectural forms to make prints with a visionary intensity. They remind us art thrives on uncertainty, on the questions we can't quite answer.