Information about the work
Pavlo Kerestei’s work Pikui (oil on canvas, 1987) was transferred to the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum collection by the Directorate of Artistic Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine in 1991. Painted during an plein-air session in the Carpathians on the border of Lviv and Zakarpattia regions, this painting—straddling abstract and figurative art—references the plastic experimentation with artistic language characteristic of that period and bears a distinct influence of the Lviv art school. The three planes of the landscape are visually discernible not through the chiaroscuro construction of classical perspective, but through their formal linear definition and color palette.
Despite the conditionality and schematic nature of the composition, the artist achieves an authentic plein-air effect, delivering an atmospheric landscape that conveys a haunting, gloomy day in the Carpathians with a view of Mount Pikui, the highest peak of the Lviv region. A local folk saying goes: “He who hasn’t seen Pikui hasn’t seen anything,” adding an ironic postmodern nuance. The deliberate Transavantgarde spontaneity—or imitation of an amateur style—and the resulting compositional dynamics align with the artist’s programmatic methodology.
Pavlo Kerestei believes that “there is no inner vision in painting or art—there is only reinterpretation and constant thought. Today, artists do not create, as they say, ‘from the gut’; on the contrary, they work from the head. And paints… I only work with color when the text of the painting dictates that there is color, pigment… My favorite paint is whatever is at hand. Beside writing, it is the cheapest way to depict an idea. Or a non-idea. It also needs to be depicted, and one must understand why it is rendered this way or another. These are the fundamental questions: what you are doing and why.”
Cardboard, oil. 95 × 105