At Sergei's 1991

Oleg Holosiy made this painting, "At Sergei's", with oil on canvas, though the exact date remains a mystery. The palette is muted, earthy, a kind of chiaroscuro, and the brushstrokes blend and blur into one another, so it's hard to pick out the precise moment when one color ends and another begins. For me that's a metaphor for artmaking itself, the way we layer and revise, always in process. Up close, you can see the texture of the canvas coming through, a rough, almost woven quality. The paint application is thinned, so it feels less like a solid surface and more like a veil, an atmosphere we’re peering through. There’s a section at the top where the paint seems to thin to almost nothing, dissolving into the ground. It's like Holosiy wants us to see the painting not just as an image, but as a record of its own making, the push and pull between intention and accident. This idea of a blurred, dreamlike scene is something I see recurring throughout his tragically short career. You might also consider the way Gerhard Richter uses similar photographic blurring effects. Art’s an ongoing conversation, isn’t it? A constant remix.