Painting is the art of expressing the invisible through the visible.

Eugène Fromentin

Painting has a profound artistic power that affects people. It can soothe and give aesthetic pleasure. Color, texture, rhythm, and composition create a holistic image that evokes a range of feelings in the viewer. A painting is a kind of artist’s confession, a lyrical self-portrait of a person at a certain moment in his or her life.

The paint, spilling onto the canvas, takes with it a part of the author’s emotions, visualizing his inner state. It is a kind of confession that brings relief and satisfaction from the creative impulse.

Volodymyr Petrovskyi from Khmelnytskyi invites us to a frank conversation with this exhibition, presenting a retrospective exhibition of his works. Still life, nude, portrait, religious themes… Such a combination of diverse paintings shows the diversity of the author’s artistic interests, a wide thematic range of his works, and his desire to show the audience something more than just a picture painted from life.

The central place in V. Petrovsky’s works is occupied by the theme of a woman who embodies eternal values: motherhood, tenderness, and beauty. At all times, artists admired the natural beauty of women. It became for them not only a part of creativity, but also a source of inspiration. A muse. Since time immemorial, her image has been reflected in many works of famous painters. The nude nature in V. Petrovsky’s interpretation fascinates with the embodiment of the eternal attractiveness of physicality, which causes admiration and awe. The heroines of the works are simultaneously recognizable and mysterious, pretty and independent, sensitive and ephemeral. The author’s paintings are characterized by multilayered and complex spatial construction. The sunny, romantic, tender and light mood is created by the pastel shades chosen by the author to depict the grace of the female body. These images contain feelings, spirituality, and romance, despite the fact that they are all completely different. For example, the portraits “In Butterflies” and “Gretta”. In addition to filling the world with beauty, women are a symbol of life and procreation in mythology. These are the themes that are reflected in the paintings “Lullaby” and “Tree of Life”.

The still lifes (“Lilac”, “Still Life”) are filled with bright, juicy colors, in which flowers seem to come to life under the artist’s hand. When you look at them, you feel inner peace and notice how beautiful ordinary things can be when skillfully interpreted by the master. Impressions of the events that took place on the Maidan (“Requiem”) and the memory for the souls of the dead (“Prayer”) are also embodied on canvas.

Painting is the author’s passion, he creates it “for the soul,” however, he mostly works on decorating churches and temples with mosaics and stained-glass. This is reflected in his easel paintings on religious themes (“Intercession”, “Christmas Angel”).

Volodymyr Petrovsky always strives for perfection, so in each of his works he brings a zest that does not allow one painting to merge with others, as each of them is original, evokes a whole range of emotions in the viewer. The subconscious of each viewer complements the paintings in its own way, forming a complete image.

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Volodymyr Petrovskyi was born in 1984 in Khmelnytskyi, studied at the V. Shkribliak Vyzhnytsia College of Decorative and Applied Arts (Department of Artistic Textiles) and Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University. The artist is a participant of many All-Ukrainian exhibitions, the International Exhibition of Painting in Chernivtsi (“Christmas Angel”), the International Plein Air and the collective exhibition in Lipany (Slovakia, 2017). Recently, he has worked on the mosaic of the Greek Catholic Church of the New Martyrs of the Ukrainian People at the military cemetery, painting the church in Ivankivtsi village, and creating a memorial plaque “To the Victims of the Holocaust”.