Europe + Africa 1993

Dmytro Kavsan made this painting, Europe + Africa, with what looks like mixed media on canvas. There's a real push-pull here in the making. At first you see it and think, oh it's a kind of landscape, but then the longer you look, the architecture starts to melt into the animals, and vice versa. I love how Kavsan isn’t trying to hide his process: you can see all the drips and smudges. The colours are mostly muted—greys, browns, whites—but then there are these flashes of bright red and orange that jolt you awake. There’s this one spot, right in the middle, where the orange and red sort of collide, it's loose and juicy. It reminds me a little of Francis Picabia's later, more figurative work, where he's just throwing paint around and letting the image emerge from the chaos. But who knows? Maybe he's never even seen Picabia. Either way, it's a wild ride.