Andjana Pachkova | From Light to Dark
Viewing Room - Andjana Pachkova From Light to Dark
Exhibition Essay
by Anna Johnson
The tension between gesture and structure, narrative and abstract form forges the core argument of abstract expressionism. Between the physicality of the brush and the symbolic energy of colour, a painter asserts their language in a crowded field. For Andjana Pachkova, line, the challenge of scale and her own private mythology form the bedrock of work that is both primal and enigmatic. With a broad palette, you could say that she engages extremes. From the urban grit of charcoal, scarlet and black to the liquid skin of a sunlit ocean heaving under a pink sky, her paintings can whisper or roar.
Sunlight - Castle in the Sky and Moonrise Kissing - He & She (SOLD), Installation View, 2023, Photo by Docqment
Generated over three tumultuous years, this new collection of works are both intensely personal and resolutely bold. A public expression of private themes. As a painter her works come out of the lineage of strong Modernist forebears and her own original experience as an artist who surfs at dawn and then wrestles her forms, informed by a process that is both visceral and physical. Pachkova says that she paints from her shoulder and not the wrist and the experience of the sea literally inverts her compositions. The centrifugal quality of many of her paintings are informed directly by the inverted perception of being underwater.
‘In the sea’, she reflects, ‘the horizon changes, and what is below becomes what is above’. The result are works suffused with energy, that break from the predominant landscape format that still governs Australian painting (in all genres). By radical contrast in these works, any way and many ways can be read as UP. And she admits that revolving her canvases as they are being painted is part of the process.
“My newest works reflect my love affair with the Ocean. We move from the Sunlight Zone where the light penetrates. The show is roughly divided into those oceanic layers or zones: it starts with the Sunlight, then it goes into the Twilight, then Midnight and then the depths of the Abyss and Trenches. I saw it in a simple way of the transition from light to dark but then on a metaphorical level of when you dig deeper into the unconscious. I see the oceanic Trenches as a place of depth and replenishment. In the fathomless depths there is bio luminescence, even in the deepest darkness a source of light”
The metaphor of descent and ascent reflects in works that glitter with the opacity of pale colour or brood with the classic existential forms and inky palette of early European expressionism. But slicing through the idea of spontaneous gestures are forms that are this artist’s alone. The symbol of the castle, over time, has come to dominate many of her strongest pieces. It is a form she attributes to disparate sources: from her childhood in the Ukraine, the longing for “what has never been—Die Sehnsucht,” to the Jungian idea of the castle as the seat of the soul and consciousness. In some of her paintings it is a structure that looks as if it is tumbling. In others, such as “The Dark Castle” it pierces the sky with a knife-like urgency. This work, the artist concedes, openly alludes to modern warfare and occupation of Ukraine.
Of so many Australian painters few are as close to this event in contemporary history as Pachkova. And her identity as a Russian born in Ukraine informs the themes of displacement in her work as well as her response to colour and light. Light, like culture, forges perception. As a painter her evolution has spanned hemispheres, aesthetics and ideologies. These distinctions matter. Trained in Moscow, her reflection on the winter light and brief summers is that these were conditions for intricacy in her art. The American light that bathed her nascent early works began to open her palette but it was in Australia that the full range was revealed and her emotional response to colour under a naked sun reach its peak of both experimentation and verve.
The joy Pachkova brings to colour and the angst of the darker works face off in this show. The discipline that unites such contrasts is her unified proportion of scale. Having collaborated with the artist Richard Goodwin in a group show that hinged on canvases that were 2 meter by 2 meters, she has made the format her own. The impact of larger scale works is intensified when large canvases are bolted together as a diptych. In these works, the eye submerges and is truly invited to walk inside rubble or coral or sheer volumes of light. Physically the works have a restless surface, balancing textures that can be raw or overwrought with accretion of all sorts of paint: housepaint, impasto acrylic and vivid enamel:
“There is something about sculpting an image between areas of flat and gestural paint. A feeling of liberation of working on a large scale. It’s a grand gesture. This exercise is pure physicality and it is liberating somehow.”
For many painters the arc of the last three years has been something of a drawn bow. The tension and supressed energy of the pandemic and, for many, the violence of climate change and war represent much deeper themes than simple confinement or release. The idea of painting through a storm is an ancient one. JMW Turner was said to have lashed himself to a mast to experience the extremes of the ocean. Other painters in this century gravitate to areas of conflict and loss, literally painting from the battlefield.
But the strongest works do not succumb to the sheer drama of conflict or the encroaching threat of the elements. The aesthetic of the works that make up this show seem to possess their own weather system and folklore, their own rules of contrast and chaos. Squaring off with the epic gestural painters of Abstract Expressionism and the Trans-Avant-Garde painters of the 80s, Pachkova does more than lean into her heritage. For every large surging painting the view changes and the canvas forms the portal, like gazing at the turbulence above from the peace of the sea floor below.
Anna Johnson
Writer
Born in Ukraine, Andjana Pachkova comes from a traditional Russian art tutoring background. Following the political movement Perestroika, she moved to Moscow and took classes at Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts. Recently interested in the infinite and treacherous possibility of oceanscapes, her works and painting process have taken on the turbulence of substance, of flowing paint and swirling water, to find a place for herself on canvas that is fluid and structured. Pachkova has studied with notable artists such as Idris Murphy, Jo Bertini, Brandt Lewis, Denis Clarke and Tony Tozer. Upon her move to Australia in 2013, she began to exhibit her work in Sydney and since 2017 has been represented by Stanley Street Gallery in New South Wales and Mercury Gallery in Moscow.
Her works are held in private collections across the United States, including Harvard Law faculty in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland, Israel and Lebanon.