March 1980

Oleksandr Aksinin made this print called ‘March’ using ink and paper in 1980. The dominant color is green, and the piece is full of tiny marks, kinda obsessive, and it’s clear the artist was in a deep state of focus. I can imagine Aksinin sitting there, pen in hand, carefully building up this bizarre scene. What was he thinking about? The two figures at the top, they’re conjoined somehow, with these long, patterned bodies. And the faces floating around the edges – they remind me of Surrealism and artists like Max Ernst. Aksinin must have been fascinated by dreams and the subconscious. Look at the texture he’s created with all those little dots and dashes. It’s like he’s building another world right there on the page, a bit like Klee, or maybe even some of the folk artists I’ve looked at over the years. Artists like Aksinin show us that painting is an endless conversation across time. We interpret, misinterpret, and build on each other’s work. It's a process of constant evolution, all these creative interpretations, all this beautiful ambiguity.