Avenir 2021

Pavlo Makov created Avenir, a large painting that’s like a field of emerging forms, a coming into being. Look closely and you can see the ghosts of marks, the pentimenti, all the decisions he made and unmade. I can imagine him moving around the canvas, maybe with charcoal and thin washes of paint, trying to find the right density for each of these repeated forms. The slight variations in color, from grays to blues, make the painting breathe. It reminds me of the seriality of Hilla and Bernd Becher, or even Sol LeWitt, but here, Makov’s hand is so present. It feels human, fallible. The overall effect is less about perfect repetition and more about the imperfect trace of process, all the beauty in the making. It is an archive of decisions, a record of an artistic conversation through time.