“Gardens Joy” by Olha Petrova

The exhausted world is still breathing edem…

Yefrem SYRIN, “About Paradise”

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Oh, dear spring has come!

Oh, severe winter is gone!

Gardens are in bloom and nightingales are singing.

My soul prospered and gave me joy.

Hryhorii SKOVORODA, “Garden of Divine Songs”

In culture of every nation and religion Garden is a synonym of Paradise. Can we imagine a Ukrainian home without a blooming garden right next to it? “Paradise evolved,” joyfully proclaims Ukrainian traditional Christmas carol. “Tangible breeze that breathes life into earthly gardens is an image of the spiritual breath that refreshes the Paradise Garden,” wrote contemporary theologian Vihen Huroian. Exhibition of paintings by Olha Petrova “Gardens Joy” is a harbinger of spring, the heavenly gift to all of us after a long, exhaustive winter.

Winter pressed us with short days without sun, frost, ice under our feet and the icicles over our heads, snowy and utterly destroyed roads. Everyone got tired of it: people, birds, animals, street cleaners, and even the city council. But “Mystetska Zbirka” is inviting everyone: “Come and join the happiness of the plum tree in bloom, lakes with lotus flowers, flowers of the sun – gardens of Olha Petrova. Her painting is not only the luxury of powerful colorism, but it is also almost childish genuine amazement and delight of the artist before inexhaustible beauty of nature.”

Painting like spring of colors is living despite sad prophecy of its death in the early 20th century. Petrova consciously opposes the conductor of modern conceptualism Marcel Duchamp, who back in 1915 tried to bury the art of colors in a urinal (“Fountain”) instead of a coffin, and his contemporary followers. Her paintings seek to prove that the genuine painting did not die and that the world with the explosiveness of colors remains an important counterargument of the aesthetics of modern negativism. Coloristic pressure of the exposition will give the viewer optimism in anticipation of spring, kisses of sun, revival of nature in lace of white blossom on branches of an old plum tree and reckless swelling of buds.

 The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky gives the feeling of the power of thunderstorm, warm rain in May, color that captures fields, sky, gardens, and city parks. From there the color of rainbow bursts to the creative studios and falls on canvases of knights of painting.

If the joy of renewed world after black and gray scale of long lasting winter appeared at your doorstep, grab it with both hands, catch this joy and transform it into poems, music, paintings, and simply in life. Add the ease in your own mind – “Gardens Joy” by Olha Petrova offers you “Ariadne’s thread” for happy everyday experience.

But the juicy Gardens of Olha Petrova have not only coloristic, but also philosophical freshness. Garden theme is not random in the Ukrainian art of the 21st century. (We can think back to the project “Gardens” by Pavlo Makov presented in 2012.) As Kharkiv philosopher Oleksandr Filonenko rightly observed, gardening is the only art in the world that is bigger than a man: artist-gardener is aware that he will not see his work in its final form, because trees grow slowly. Therefore, planting of a garden requires hope in God and cooperation with Him, in a literal sense. While modern “contemporary art” usually refers to the temporal and immanent things, Petrova’s choice of the theme of garden means return to something bigger, namely the theme of hope. Only culture saturated with experience of hope can afford to develop gardens. And only such culture can happily extend itself in the lives of future generations.