Dragonflies Domesticated

Incredible as it sounds, one of the most well-to-do Ukrainian artists, Oleksiy Lytvynenko, has only had three personal exhibitions: at Kyiv’s gallery Irena, in Paris, and now again at Irena.

Mr. Lytvynenko himself must have been at a loss to come up with a title which could refer to all his most recent paintings, so the current exhibition bears no name. Still, one undoubtedly feels a certain unity of concept in it. The purely abstract Human Dimension and The Seasons, more or less traditional for Mr. Lytvynenko, stand side by side with pictures portraying some quite recognizable characters (Phoenix), with most of them being insects, beetles and dragonflies, not so popular among artists. A dragonfly turns into a Lybid or personifies free flight (Wings), while Scarabs must be directly linked to Reminiscences of Egypt, with all the cosmogonic symbols that this implies. Thus, temporary (no one knows how long) devotion to entomology does not preclude Mr. Lytvynenko from impressing us again with the scale of his concepts and implementations.