Biography
Pavlo Abramovych Taiber (1940, Kharkiv – 2017, Statesville, USA) was a painter, artist of monumental and decorative art, and educator.
1963 — Graduated from the Kharkiv State Art College.
1963–1971 — Studied at the Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute.
1978 — Became a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. From then on, he participated in republican, all-Union, and international exhibitions in Ukraine, Russia, Sweden, and the United States.
From 1979 — Lecturer at the Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute.
1992 — Honored Artist of Ukraine.
Lived and worked in Kharkiv; in 1995, he emigrated to California, USA.
The artist’s oeuvre is multifaceted, combining profound psychological depth, poetic quality, and philosophical contemplation. He represents the post-avant-garde era. His paintings are characterized by an underlying lyrical autobiographism and deep personal confession. The artist sought to depict the world as tranquil, joyful, and luminous. Most of his works were created based on the author’s personal experiences and memories. “Beneath the outer shell of a mature master, there always remained that very child returning to the origins, to images simple in both form and meaning” (Private Museum of Contemporary Art of Ukraine).
The artist’s entire childhood cycle is theatricalized. He constructed his own personal childhood realm, depicting various scenes populated by small, unreal, fantastical characters. His canvases feature a certain theatricalized performance, mises-en-scène complete with attributes of histrionic costumes and masks. The latter balance on the boundary between the hidden and the genuine, hypocrisy and sincerity.
The artist speaks of this dual dimension of reality in a metaphorical form in his work Black Puppy [Chorne tsutsenya] (canvas, oil, 1989; entered the collection of the Sumy Regional Art Museum in 1990). Before us is a small figure of a child, rendered in a conventionally primitive manner. This is a full-length depiction of a three-to-five-year-old boy with large round eyes, holding a black puppy. The composition is frontal and static: the character stands upright, his joined hands evoking a sense of closedness, inner concentration, or even anxiety. The boy is dressed in the costume of Harlequin—a character from commedia dell’arte, a type of Italian popular street theater that originated in the mid-16th century. The figure resembles a theatrical or puppet character. He wears broad knee-length trousers and stockings, a tall pointed paper cap on his head, and white ruffles on his collar around his neck. Tucked inside his garment, he holds a puppy.
The color scheme is subdued, dominated by dark, muted shades of brown, black, and gray. The lighting is localized, focused on the face. The sole accent is a reddish element of clothing, which draws attention and adds drama to the image. A black outline around the figure successfully separates him from the dark background of the canvas. The center of psychological tension is the boy’s face, split in half by chiaroscuro. Its left side is painted in brown, heightening the effect of dual perception, where the inner world is juxtaposed with the external one. The figure is isolated against a dark, almost neutral background, creating an atmosphere of intimacy and chamber-like privacy. The absence of spatial details amplifies the feeling of solitude and estrangement.
The work leans toward Naive art, yet possesses a psychological subtext filled with emotional tension and a somewhat anxious atmosphere. The generalized forms, the disproportionate figure (a large head, a small body), and the simplified modeling all work to enhance the expressiveness of the image, which can be interpreted as a metaphor testifying to human vulnerability and childhood solitude. At the same time, the influence of the Expressionist tradition is palpable. The deliberately chosen theatricality of the image demands an answer to the question: who are we truly beyond the “costume”? The artist constructed a personalized space inhabited by small characters with their own inner feelings. The children inside the paintings are constantly dressing up and staging plays, unaware that they are those very charming actors and marionettes who have settled forever in the artist’s own world.
