Crackled Sun

The Akvarel Gallery hosts the one-man show of a Kyiv-based artist Oleksandr Tarnovsky, which he named Solar Improvisation.

Oleksandr Tarnovsky is an architect by education and jeweler by calling. He dedicates all his free time to painting and prefers using a quite complex, precise, and arguably jeweler’s technique. Thus, some of his works are covered with a network of fine artificially induced cracks, so- called craquelures, which break the image into a multitude of fragments, simultaneously making it especially distinctive.

Yet, his works are not all about craquelures. Tarnovsky’s paintings are harmonious and bright, very poetic (often accompanied by the author’s poems), and simultaneously call for the most sophisticated philosophic interpretations. Such are his spring garden (Spring in the Garden) and grand forest permeated with sunlight (Sun Improvisation, Summer. A Morning in the Forest), majestic and yet terrestrial sunset (Where the Solar Star Ends the Day), and the setting of an unknown star observed from some unknown planet (A Sunset in the Constellation of the Universes), and, finally, the fragile castle in the sky shrouded in multicolored clouds (Mirage).