A Fashist Flew by 2022

Kateryna Lysovenko's painting, ‘A Fashist Flew By’ seems to be made with thin washes of muted tones, mostly reds and blues, which feels like a way of letting the image emerge slowly, like a memory. The surface is interesting because it feels very raw, the paint looks like it's been pushed around, maybe with a dry brush? There's a real sense of the hand in this work. If you look closely at the way the faces are rendered you'll see a sort of vulnerability created by the slightly clumsy, searching application of the paint. The marks around the figures are loose, and the edges are soft, which blurs the boundaries between the figures and their environment. I like how this effect, this blurring, creates a sense of intimacy but also of uncertainty. There's something about the emotional directness of this painting which reminds me of Paula Modersohn-Becker, another artist who wasn't afraid to paint the everyday with a kind of awkward honesty. Like her work, Lysovenko’s painting reminds us that art is as much about feeling and experiencing as it is about seeing.