Exit 4 2021

Curator: Here we have Pavlo Makov’s “Exit 4,” a print created in 2021. It is a fascinatingly graphic work, utilizing line and geometry in its cityscape portrayal. What’s your first impression of the piece? Editor: Utterly unsettling! Like a schematic diagram for…urban melancholy? It feels less like a map and more like a maze you're doomed to wander. Those little buildings all in a row…they seem trapped, somehow. Curator: Precisely. Makov's compositions often evoke such feelings. Formally, consider the limited palette – the stark contrasts created by the careful application of red and blue lines that function almost diagrammatically. The buildings progress from uniform in their placement, but culminate into more disarray lower on the picture plane. Editor: Disarray is the perfect word. It's like watching order collapse. Each of these miniature structures is presented like a single stage within some bureaucratic project of urban engineering... Curator: A deconstruction, perhaps? Makov uses geometric forms – these blocks of buildings– juxtaposing them within the framework of what initially presents as a plan or even some sort of signage with 'Exit 4' bolded in red ink at the top-right of the artwork. Editor: The red against all that monochrome has real power here, yes! All this attention is focused right where you DON'T want to focus...that feeling that the exit has now transformed from being what we thought...the road out. Now this seems more like...an architectural black hole, or urban anxiety, compressed onto a page. The overall tonal and textural complexity of each structure becomes much more prevalent once viewed in contrast. Curator: Note, too, the deliberate ambiguity. We can draw connections between form and content, such as how linear precision dissolves. It mirrors, I think, a wider discourse surrounding place, identity and modernity within post-Soviet geographies. Editor: It certainly feels weighty, doesn't it? This simple graphic, its geometry...I think this captures that sensation we've all experienced while lost – that claustrophobic realization that any direction, or choice, ultimately brings you back to precisely the same point again. Curator: A cyclical hopelessness, elegantly conveyed through visual vocabulary, indeed. Editor: So... not quite the promising city escape then I'd been hoping for.