« I’ve been coming to Hydra island over the past years. There’s an old slaughterhouse where they show art. The first time, I stood in line outside of it to see George Condo’s paintings, and found myself chuckling at the Auschwitz joke my father used to tell: two men in line for the gas chamber, arguing, when a third turns to them and hisses, “Shush, you’re going to get us in trouble!”

 

Hydra became the place I bring my family from Ukraine, one week a year. It was a promise I made to myself and kept. I figured if I had to survive a week with the family, having art nearby wouldn’t hurt. It lowers the risk of going insane. Days I swam and slept. Evenings, my wife and I went out among the art people and other acquaintances, taking in the alcohol. Nights, I drank more, swam again, and lay on the warm stone of the street imagining paintings, thinking of how impossible things really are. It’s a peculiar thing, being a young artist. Your desires are too large to be sweet about, and it leaves you feeling mostly trapped. Your family is in a country at war. Your wife is giving everything she has to a gallery nobody seems to notice. And there you are, flat on a stone, wondering what you might have said wrong to someone you don’t even care about, but who you believe could change your life with one snap of the fingers. And then you tell yourself none of this matters and go back to imagining paintings.

 

This year I didn’t make it to Hydra. I made these paintings instead. I thought of sunsets on the island, the blue of the water, the stone, and God’s teeth that keep grinding and chirping at my face. I thought of how some places have a talent for making one’s humanity feel naked and close. The paintings turned into something like psychological x-rays: teeth, sex, desire, myth, all colliding on one surface. »

 

words by Daniel Spivakov