There is one thing in Sulymenko’s watercolour paintings, that holds an audience spellbound. In the design and style of laconic simplicity, she depicts mysterious and puzzling environments. These are primarily inside but also exterior spaces, narrow and closed, surrounded by walls that seem palpable. In this silenced environment of clear gray air, the eye does not attain the horizon—there seems to be none.
The sceneries are hardly inhabited. When nameless figures seem, they are predominantly on your own, sometimes two or three of them. Not characters, only beings. They do not seem specifically to the viewer, they gaze away. And even with the research for a link, they do not basically belong crossroads of human relations are scarce here. It is as if time has stopped. Captured in a minute, which seems to be prolonged. The second transforming into a point out not starting to be, but rather—and just—being. Caught among the “no longer” and “not however,” they are waiting around for one thing to emerge, transpire, probably modify.
“Etwas fehlt, was das ist, weiß guy nicht,” writes Brecht in Mahagonny.1 For Maria Sulymenko, it is not so a lot about a unique reduction or disappearance, unique suffering or grief, but about the fragility of lifetime and the inevitability of darkness. She depicts loneliness but also deliberately decided on solitude angst, and traumatic fears, as well as present-day distresses and anxieties that direct to absurd situations and the imaginary. She quietly, nearly naively, issues the troubles of just currently being (and not essentially getting), of basically enduring in this globe. There is no naïve optimism, but there exist bits of hope, she statements, an anticipation of a much better time. “Each minute is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, the place time’s eager edges are consistently renewed. We elevate our foot from the reliable floor of all our everyday living lived consequently significantly and just take that perilous stage out into the vacant air. Not since we can claim any certain courage, but since there is no other way.”2
at Georg Kargl BOX, Vienna
right up until October 8, 2022