There’s something inside Sulymenko’s watercolour work, that holds an viewers spellbound. Within the fashion of laconic simplicity, she depicts mysterious and puzzling environments. These are primarily inside but in addition exterior areas, slim and closed, surrounded by partitions that seem palpable. On this silenced ambiance of clear gray air, the attention doesn’t attain the horizon—there appears to be none.

The sceneries are barely inhabited. When anonymous figures seem, they’re primarily alone, generally two or three of them. Not characters, solely beings. They don’t look on to the viewer, they gaze away. And regardless of the seek for a connection, they don’t really belong; crossroads of human relations are uncommon right here. It’s as if time has stopped. Captured in a second, which appears to be extended. The second remodeling right into a state; not turning into, however relatively—and simply—being. Caught between the “now not” and “not but,” they’re ready for one thing to emerge, occur, possibly change.

“Etwas fehlt, was das ist, weiß man nicht,” writes Brecht in Mahagonny.¹ For Maria Sulymenko, it isn’t a lot a few specific loss or disappearance, distinctive ache or grief, however in regards to the fragility of life and the inevitability of darkness. She depicts loneliness but in addition deliberately chosen solitude; angst, and traumatic fears, in addition to up to date distresses and anxieties that result in absurd conditions and the imaginary. She quietly, nearly naively, questions the difficulties of simply being (and never essentially turning into), of merely enduring on this world. There isn’t a naïve optimism, however there exist bits of hope, she claims, an anticipation of a greater time. “Every second is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, the place time’s eager edges are continuously renewed. We carry our foot from the stable floor of all our life lived so far and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not as a result of we will declare any specific braveness, however as a result of there isn’t any different approach.”²

at Georg Kargl BOX, Vienna
till October 8, 2022

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