Olena Onufriv

Painting of Olena Onufrive, an artist from Lviv, in the first place, strikes a viewer with its pictorial strength and southern temperament, with its bright colors, as if these paintings were not from Lviv, but from the very heart of the tropics, from the distant shores of the South Seas. This kind of painting exemplifies a specific creative paradigm that may be called hedonistic. It originates from enjoyment of life in all its manifestations including visually attractive representation of the being. The art that exists within this paradigm is sensual, almost ecstatic. It represents new positive world-view: forgotten are horrors of modernism and vain sophistications of post-modernism, new generation chooses happiness and bright emotions. Olena Onufriv is the bearer of such a type of mentality that gives us new hope.

This artist perceives color as substance. Out of this substance she models forms – densely, lavishly, with great delight and inspiration, giving herself up to the act of creativity as to lovemaking. To certain extent this point may be explained by the fact that she studied technology of art glass at Lviv Academy for Fine Arts, i.e. she worked with substantiality of color in the literal meaning of the word. This is where these pastose strokes and richness of the glossy, embossed, utterly material paint lair from. This is not an illusion, this is substance (it might be the reason why we want to feel this works by touch). Onufriv’s painting possesses sensuality able to awake our tactile sensation to such degree that when we see these works it may seem we are holding the brush and laying thick paint onto the canvas ourselves, perceiving its resistance, as though we were trying to overcome physical laws in order to establish our reign over the substance, to create new worlds with color. Because color is an integral characteristic of an object. Color is the substance itself. Everything in the universe has its color – that, what is outside and that, what is inside. This way we see the world - this way the world exists for us. Reality exists here and now, and it is colored. Thus, this kind of painting is an absolute embodiment of painting. It is painting for painting as the process of creation.

And this kind of painting does not require complex subjects or compositions. It is enough to concentrate on a small thing, on a fragment of reality, but to reproduce/re-create this fragment with such sensuality and strength, childish spontaneity and boldness that it becomes more convincing a thing than many other well-designed and thought-out pictures. Olena Onufriv portrays small parts of reality: landscapes and flowers. That is almost all. But that is enough. Her flowers are zoomed in; they are large and all-absorbing: flowers-universes, beyond the limits of which nothing can exist. The artist utterly stylizes the images and turns her floral compositions into marvelous decorative objects just as some floral “mandalas” that bring us piece and happiness while we contemplate them. Landscapes, created by the artist, either England or Greece, are also full of this joy of life, warmth and bright colors. They are only small fragments: quiet nooks, small courtyards and balconies, narrow lanes that are flooded with sunshine or are full of shimmering, color shadows. Sometimes these segments of reality are so closely zoomed in and fragmented that they seem to be almost abstract compositions, in which the most important part is given to color and light.

Expressive manner to lay paint and this fragmented compositions resemble impressionists’ style. But the color is almost psychedelic: very bright, saturated, rich. Brush strokes look like many-colored pieces of smalt that are gathered in a mosaic; they shape, form, create a new world – a better, brighter, very cosy and happy world.

The great painter Henri Matisse meditated upon such an art that would resemble a comfortable chair where a human being could have a rest from everyday turmoil. Olena Onufriv’s works follow this conceptual directive. Her painting is a rest from routine and monotony, the way to escape from the dullness that makes our life senseless. It lacks the criticality of our time, but it possesses the quality of divine simplicity and, one can say, femininity of that kind which accepts life as blessing. This kind of painting will always exist whatever conceptual or any other search would undertake the art, because it possesses stability of one, the most important for humankind, wish – wish of happiness.