Red Room 1989

Vasiliy Ryabchenko painted Red Room in an unknown year with oil on canvas. The energetic strokes and bold palette suggests that painting for Ryabchenko is like a way of thinking aloud. The materiality of this work is really striking. The paint is applied in such a way that you can almost feel the artist's hand moving across the canvas. There's a real physicality to the medium. Take the figure on the right. The thickness of the paint gives her weight, presence. See the splatters around her head? It's like Ryabchenko is unafraid to let the paint do its thing, to embrace the messiness of the process. Ryabchenko reminds me of other painters like Francis Bacon, who weren't afraid to push the boundaries of figuration and abstraction. Ultimately, this is a painting that resists easy answers, that invites us to linger and look again, finding new meanings and connections with each viewing.