Morning, ficus, swallows (colour insert from Abracadabra) 2019

Pavlo Makov created this mixed media work, Morning, ficus, swallows, and like many artists, his process feels like a conversation between intention and accident. The orange ground isn’t smooth, but worked into with textured marks, making the ficus tree and swallows feel suspended within an active, living space. The colour here is really emotionally charged. It's not just the intensity of the orange but how it plays against the cool greens and greys. There’s a tension between the abstractly rendered sky and the tiny architectural renderings at the base, as if the aerial perspective has been upended, or made permeable. Look at the place where the ficus sprouts from the ground. It’s right where the worked orange of the ‘sky’ meets the granular greys of the townscape. The tree feels a bit like a bridge. The botanical and the architectural, the abstract and the figurative, all leaning on each other, creating a wonderfully strange harmony. I am thinking of Giorgio Morandi, another artist whose work embraces ambiguity and multiple interpretations.