At Sergei's #2 (In the bedroom) 1991

Oleg Holosiy made this large-scale painting, with expressive marks in burnt orange and dark shadowy tones, perhaps in his studio but maybe even *at Sergei’s*. I'm thinking about Holosiy layering the paint, scraping back, adding more. Look at the figures emerging from the gloom, how they’re almost not there. It looks like Holosiy might have been thinking about memory, how things fade, shift. Imagine him stepping back, squinting, tilting his head. Is it done? What does it need? That push and pull of creation is so present here. I like to think about Holosiy in dialogue with other artists, maybe someone like Leon Kossoff, or even Chaim Soutine. It's like a conversation across time, where artists are constantly riffing on each other's ideas. And it makes me wonder, what would Holosiy have gone on to make? What other conversations would he have joined? Painting’s like that, an open-ended question.