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Untitled

a painting that doesn't need words

In 2012 the Ukrainian painter Svyatoslav Ryabkin made the “Untitled” picture (72x92 cm) deliberately leaving it without the title so that the observer was free to imagine something evanescent.

Instead the subject is very concrete! There is a little girl sitting waiting with her eyes turned upwards and her lips parted as if to kiss. And in the background the sweet profile of a woman who brings a white rose to her face to smell its perfume.

Multiple interpretations can be given to this evocative image that celebrates women in her different ages. The scent of the rose is evanescent, which sooner or later will fade, and the dark female figure that appears to the girl as a memory is also evanescent.

Only Ryabkin knows what he had in his heart when he put the contrasting primary colours on the canvas in this balanced, almost geometric, combination, in which the girl's red dress stands out in the foreground and catches our attention. The background is made up of two parts: one turquoise and one yellow. Both of them are lined with brushstrokes of colour spread in abundance. The light blue strip, that separates them, appears as soft as a curtain and then continues along the sides framing the canvas. "Untitled" would look great in a little girl's bedroom, don't you agree with me?!

Childhood is represented by the delicacy of the flower and the blonde blue-eyed girl (these somatic features are the favourite for the artist and they are chosen in many other his paintings as “Gold hair“). Instead, the interpretation of the context is arbitrary. The woman can be the memory of her (dead) or the same child as an adult or the mother who watches over her daughter at all times even when she is far away. Not by chance the same colour (white) is on the girl’s dress and on the rose. And the flower takes on the metaphorical meaning of life in bloom.

All the Arts in general convey the same concept through different ways of expression: Art is beauty and life too. Celebrating life through Art is the apotheosis of beauty. We all contribute to celebrate life especially during the sad period that the artist is experiencing in his country nowadays. He has been expressing his state of mind through new works. Understandably these subjects are very different from this in the "Untitled" painting which calms our soul and transmits tenderness.

This painting was exhibited in 2017 both in the Villa Simion Gallery (in Spinea town) and in Martellago (near Venice) at the Per.Gola tavern. Now it is located in the Pica Cornici shop in Mogliano Veneto (near Treviso).

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by Elena Sechet

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