Bright-Stemmed Swimmer

Since 2022, the theme of the “Virtual Garden” in Stepan Ryabchenko’s work has taken on new meanings. Now, he paints his flowers on paper using a bamboo brush and ink. A large series of these works is titled “Black Fairy Tale.” The events of the war and the constant tension experienced by the artist in his native Odesa — where the southern, festive blossoming is being destroyed by deadly shelling and devastation — have become the foundation for his new “author’s myth”: a myth about huge black flowers that grow, flourish, and terrify, and about birds that perch on their stems or soar around them, anxiously flapping their wings.

In these works, perhaps the most ancient theme of humanity and nature acquires new figurative visions. They uniquely combine echoes of Ukrainian fairy tales, motifs of Eastern calligraphy, and modern expressive drawing. Cultural archetypes are filled with a vivid subjectivity of experience, outlining a dramatic emotional space in which the artist seeks and builds ways to understand and preserve the living and the viable.

The romantic worldview inherent to the artist, with its characteristic aestheticism, its view of the world through art, and its search for harmony, resonates clearly and directly in his dynamic, tense drawings. Created sometimes on individual sheets and sometimes on large, long paper scrolls, they unfold into a singular narrative where, as in poetry, a single motif, image, or fragment acquires new meanings through variation and repetition, transforming into an expressive metaphor and a poetic artistic statement.

Galyna Sklyarenko, art historian