Maria Sulymenko “Is it time, yet?” at Georg Kargl BOX, Vienna
There is one thing inside of Sulymenko’s watercolour paintings, that retains an audience spellbound. In the design and style of laconic simplicity, she depicts mysterious and puzzling environments. These are principally interior but also exterior areas, narrow and shut, surrounded by partitions that look palpable. In this silenced environment of transparent gray air, the eye does not get to the horizon—there looks to be none.
The sceneries are barely inhabited. When anonymous figures seem, they are predominantly on your own, at times two or 3 of them. Not figures, only beings. They do not look straight to the viewer, they gaze away. And even with the look for for a relationship, they do not essentially belong crossroads of human relations are uncommon in this article. It is as if time has stopped. Captured in a moment, which would seem to be extended. The minute transforming into a state not becoming, but rather—and just—being. Caught amongst the “no longer” and “not however,” they are waiting for something to arise, occur, possibly transform.
“Etwas fehlt, was das ist, weiß guy nicht,” writes Brecht in Mahagonny.1 For Maria Sulymenko, it is not so significantly about a distinct reduction or disappearance, exclusive ache or grief, but about the fragility of everyday living and the inevitability of darkness. She depicts loneliness but also intentionally picked out solitude angst, and traumatic fears, as nicely as up to date distresses and anxieties that guide to absurd predicaments and the imaginary. She quietly, nearly naively, questions the complications of just becoming (and not necessarily getting to be), of merely enduring in this environment. There is no naïve optimism, but there exist bits of hope, she claims, an anticipation of a greater time. “Each second is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where by time’s keen edges are continually renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our existence lived therefore far and consider that perilous stage out into the vacant air. Not since we can declare any individual bravery, but since there is no other way.”2
at Georg Kargl BOX, Vienna
right up until Oct 8, 2022