Portrait 1985

Oleg Holosiy made this painting of a male figure with oils, sometime before 1993. Look at the way the artist has worked the paint, swiping and layering like buttery strokes, in a palette that’s both muted and kind of dreamy. You can see the history of mark-making, the building up and scraping away, the ghost of each gesture. I can almost feel Oleg there, in the studio, moving around the canvas, trying to get it just right. That single dash of yellow on the chest—it’s like a little jolt of electricity, isn’t it? It reminds me of other painters—maybe someone like Marlene Dumas, or even Chaim Soutine, who knew how to push figuration to the edge of abstraction. It’s like Oleg is in conversation with them. Painting is this ongoing dialogue, across time, across studios, one artist whispering to another, inspiring each other.