Kiss 1989

Oleg Holosiy made this painting called, Kiss, and it's a hundred by a hundred centimeters. You know, when I look at this work, I see Holosiy wrestling with figuration. It’s like he's asking himself, what can a body be in paint? Look at those hands, like dark flowers blooming around the face. I imagine him layering color, scraping it back, building up this shadowy, intimate space. Was he trying to capture a fleeting moment or a primal connection? Holosiy’s work reminds me of other painters pushing the boundaries of representation. I think of Francis Bacon's distorted figures, or maybe the raw emotion in a Baselitz painting. Artists are always talking to each other across time, aren’t they? "Kiss" invites us to slow down, to feel the weight of the paint, and to embrace the uncertainty of what we're seeing. What does it mean to kiss? What does it mean to embrace? I'm left wondering what he might have created if he had lived longer.