Utopia. Big Plan 2005

Pavlo Makov made this work called 'Utopia. Big Plan' using, I imagine, layers of washes, glazes, and maybe printmaking techniques to build up this complex surface. I love the way the subdued palette—earthy browns, murky greens, and ghostly blacks—creates a sense of something ancient, like a map of a lost city. It gives me the feeling that Makov was absorbed, spending hours layering and erasing to find the right balance. The textures are everything here, right? You can almost feel the grit and grain of the paper. There’s a tension here: between the flatness of the picture plane and the illusion of depth. This pushing and pulling—this play of light and dark, order and chaos—speaks to something deep about the human condition. Like, what is Utopia anyway? Is it a real place or only a state of mind? Maybe Makov is in conversation with artists like Kiefer, who also layer history and memory to create these kinds of big, ambitious paintings. It's not just about the finished image, but about the whole process of making and unmaking.