Voloshyn Gallery

There is something special in the way Sulymenko’s surfaces hold their own history. Similar to how a memory forms, she builds an image in successive and half-visible passes of watercolor and gouache, so that the finished surface is just as much an archive of its own making as it is a completed image. Figures and spaces seem to accumulate over time rather than emerge all at once.

Her locations go unnamed. A certain familiarity trails through the sites, though it is the familiarity of a vague recollection rather than of a real place. That distance is what keeps them from reading as literal settings. Instead, they become states of suspension. Never an outright displacement, but something of its logic runs beneath, the sense of standing between one place and another. The few figures who occupy these spaces are subject to the same condition. They do nothing but exist, and that is the whole of what they offer.

Sulymenko has described her method as instinctive rather than programmatic. Closer to recording a way of seeing than illustrating a specific idea. It is that reticence that gives the work its authority. Nothing here is staged for our benefit. The paintings withhold as easily as they show. We are left to account for the silence, and to sit with a quiet anxiety.

The unpredictable nature of the material lends itself to an uneasy tension the paintings impose on their viewers. There’s no hint of a resolution, and we are put in the midst of a familiar yet distant moment that doesn’t have a beginning or end.