Precious Beauty

Exhibition of works of the famous Kyiv enamelers Tetiana and Serhiy Kolechko opened in the Griffin Gallery. The precious beauty of this ancient, most complicated, and most refined art is filled in the work of the artistic couple with a contemporary tone, simultaneously a reminder and an appeal.

The works by Tetiana Kolechko might seem more traditional, in the best sense of this word. Their connection with the glorious past of enamel art, especially with Byzantium and Kyivan Rus’, is not exactly stronger but clearer. Here the plot is necessary, in it is the event and the wonder. This wonder is drawn with thin golden threads and painted with the impeccably clean and tender colors that exist perhaps only in enamel. The wonder, as should be, is wonderful. But simultaneously it is not so much a shock as a discovery, the recognition possible in the most trivial reality. Of course, Creation of a Bird is a wise and a somewhat sad fairy tale, and Festive Bells are possible only at a festivity, but next (and equal to them) to them appears the domestic revelation of Colored Eyeglasses (something like what we remember from the childhood “I look into the glass green in color/ And winter at once turns to summer”). In general, in the wonders of Tetiana Kolechko, with all their astonishing beauty and solemn significance, there is always something homey. It is a world entrusted to Guardian Angels. One feels not only happy but also calm in it. Perhaps precisely this is why rolling up the skies, which frightens many (including many artists), is called here The Beginning.

The enamels by Serhiy Kolechko, if one may say so, are more picturesque. Color is important in them, color to the point of self- sufficiency, sometimes, it appears, even to the point of independence. Of course, this is, first of all, the impression produced, one might say, by the artist’s correct and mathematically exact calculation. In the long run, enamel is not watercolor, where improvisation is acceptable, but an intense battle with fire, where even not even a mistake but the slightest miscalculation can turn into a catastrophe. And still, the works by Serhiy Kolechko are different. They are not narration, rather contemplation. Their seeming lack of plot in reality is a crystal shining with multiple facets, each of which is an impression, mood, association, and at last a thought. Enamel suddenly appears to be the technique acceptable not only for Landscapes but also for Road Sketches. However, the issue is not that these Road Sketches (executed in enamel) are generalized or turn into something more significant, but in the result that appears to be this significant in itself, The Season of Blossom, for example.