“When there are no words left, or when they still exist but are no longer capable of explaining anything.” This is how Pavlo Makov interprets the word abracadabra, which has become the title of his latest author’s book. The book, in turn, brings together a major cycle of works of the same name, on which Makov has been working for the past
11 years. The cycle began with maps of cities, including Kharkiv, and even Kharkiv under siege. It concludes with hyperbolised plants towering over the small remnants of cities and of human presence as such. “Something that has no explanation and contradicts common sense, something absolutely incompatible with everyday life” — this is what abracadabra means to Makov.
The work that concludes the book and opens the exhibition is an emerald plantain sprouting from what is now a deserted orange ground. The works that follow — a dandelion set against an anxious background, a flower with geometrised leaves, a map-landscape, and other works shown at The Naked Room — already belong to an afterword, to the need to “say a little more” once the essential has already, it seems, been said. Created in Kharkiv over the past year and first presented in Kyiv on days on the brink of a complete blackout, these works mark for the artist (and, ultimately, for the gallery as well) the beginning of something as yet unknown, while already outlining a certain trajectory for moving forward.
At the core of the plantain (A House near the Road, or Self-Portrait) and the dandelion (Our Joy) lies a naturalistic mode of drawing unusual for Makov, based on his own photographs of plants near his dacha in the Kharkiv region. Landscape with a Fig Leaf and The Flower of Kharkiv, meanwhile, continue a theme that is currently important to the artist: the herbarium as a metaphor for life, which increasingly resembles not living plants but memories of them. A separate object is Makov’s working notebook. On one of the open spreads we see yet another, unexpected self-portrait and Makov’s gaze turned upon himself. The original notebook will be on view only on the opening day and during the first weekend; afterwards, the artist will continue to draw in it.
The exhibition precedes a major museum presentation of Makov at the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, opening in April, where the artist, together with curators Maria Lanko and Lizaveta German, will present the Abracadabra series in its entirety.
