Eyes 1992

Oleg Holosiy made this artwork, Eyes, with what looks like watercolour, and you can see how the paint pools, drips, and stains the paper, really letting the medium speak for itself. It’s a process, seeing what paint can do. The washy translucence gives the whole image an ethereal quality, like a dream. Those eyes emerge from a kind of golden fog. The materiality here is about lightness, transience, things fading in and out of view. If you look closely at the upper part of the image, the pigment appears to have dripped down the page to create these mountain-like formations. It’s like he let gravity do some of the work. The way Holosiy uses the properties of watercolour reminds me a little of Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain paintings. It’s like he is saying that art doesn't have to be so serious, or laboured over, sometimes it’s just about letting things flow and seeing what happens.