Composition 1981

Hryhorii Havrylenko made this watercolor painting, Composition, with broad washes of watery pigment and a regular distribution of marks. I can imagine him hovering over the sheet, coaxing the water, pulling it around with his brush. The horizontal stripes remind me of Agnes Martin's quiet geometries. But here, Havrylenko rejects the grid. Instead, he allows the colours to flow like some kind of strange weather system, punctuated by these dark, almost bloody-looking bars, which could be read as some kind of symbolic language, hieroglyphs, perhaps? I love the fluidity of the paint. It feels like a private moment, a meditative exercise in colour and form, and it invites us to slow down and consider what it means to communicate through pure abstraction. It's like he's saying, "Here, look at this, maybe you'll feel something too." Artists are always talking to each other like that.