There is something within just Sulymenko’s watercolour paintings, that retains an audience spellbound. In the model of laconic simplicity, she depicts mysterious and puzzling environments. These are mainly inside but also exterior spaces, slim and closed, surrounded by walls that appear palpable. In this silenced environment of transparent gray air, the eye does not achieve the horizon—there seems to be none.
The sceneries are hardly inhabited. When anonymous figures look, they are mainly on your own, at times two or 3 of them. Not people, only beings. They do not glance right to the viewer, they gaze away. And regardless of the look for for a link, they do not in fact belong crossroads of human relations are uncommon listed here. It is as if time has stopped. Captured in a instant, which looks to be extended. The second reworking into a point out not getting to be, but rather—and just—being. Caught among the “no longer” and “not yet,” they are ready for a thing to arise, occur, maybe change.
“Etwas fehlt, was das ist, weiß man nicht,” writes Brecht in Mahagonny.1 For Maria Sulymenko, it is not so a great deal about a individual reduction or disappearance, distinct suffering or grief, but about the fragility of lifestyle and the inevitability of darkness. She depicts loneliness but also intentionally decided on solitude angst, and traumatic fears, as effectively as up to date distresses and anxieties that direct to absurd scenarios and the imaginary. She quietly, just about naively, questions the troubles of just becoming (and not automatically becoming), of merely enduring in this environment. There is no naïve optimism, but there exist bits of hope, she promises, an anticipation of a far better time. “Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, exactly where time’s keen edges are frequently renewed. We carry our foot from the reliable floor of all our daily life lived as a result significantly and take that perilous move out into the empty air. Not due to the fact we can declare any individual braveness, but for the reason that there is no other way.”2
at Georg Kargl BOX, Vienna
right up until Oct 8, 2022