Washing machine

Two meters in width and a bit less than a meter in length pictures (already established format of Suslenko) – not quite a provocation, not really a joke. At first glance, this painting may seem somewhat naive and obvious. All these picturesque blots, splashes, wide brush strokes, light-color whirlwinds and squiggles are clearly the direct relatives of abstract expressionism, new wave of the 80's, pop art and, as for me, that direction in contemporary Chinese painting that is inspired by anime ( cartoon characters on the Suslenko' canvas appear from time to time too ).

The previous series of canvases entitled "Aircraft, pilots, sky and a kite" seemed to be the most perfect painting experiment of this artist, a youthful study of the possibilities of painting in the sphere of cinematic foreshortenings and special effects: "framing", "rapid", "fast rewind" and all that. This time the author escaped the plot, but introduced text messages and "promises" into his compositions from stains and stains, and in the direct sense of the word (one of the pictures is called "Fuck"). A kind of tribute to conceptualism, somewhat delayed in Lviv - that the work of Andriy Sahaydakovskuy or Myroslav Yahoda is a vivid confirmation.

The artist doesn't hide that the series ''Washing machine'' will be interesting to those who are disgusted with the "gnashing of post-industrial artistic teeth" and who doesn't like sweet pop. So, on the one hand, this is an absolutely insane, non-binding painting; on the other - most of those young authors who in their creative search declares: I see so, and does not reflect on how others see it.

If art, as the German artist Gerhardt Richter once wrote, is a special way of our daily relationships with visibility, in which we recognize ourselves and everything that surrounds us, then art is an opportunity to think about everything differently, to recognize visibility as fundamentally inadequate. For example: what if all pictures are painted with a washing machine? The painting by Oleh Suslenko is adequate to his era and perception, grown on aesthetics of TV, kitsch and glamor by spectators. That's why he rather looks like a "not-Lviv" artist and fits perfectly into the international pictorial language. The draft is accompanied by a small author's commentary, which says, in particular: "Washing machine is the series of the finest canvases, which were specially created with love and th please your eyes."

Mariya Khrushchak