From 20 October to 20 November 2017, the Museum of Odesa Modern Art will present a large-scale exhibition Inside by Matvei Weisberg (Kyiv).

In the midst of eternity and elementality, “man” emerges. His curse for the pursuit of knowledge becomes the burden of shaping his temporary and in this incongruous existence. In the face of the order of universal space, we humans become unbearably small and pathetic in our finitude. Here, in the hesitant and doubtful opposite of the sacred, art is born, which is able to transform the thought of the horror of existence into a longing for liberation from the incongruous.

Matvei Vaysberg, Ukrainian painter and illustrator. Surrounded by images acting and living before his eyes, contemplating their essence, the author allows the viewer to retreat before the daily struggle for the realisation of human existence. Appealing to biblical subjects, drawing on the legacy of the old masters, turning to modernity, the narrator creates a chronicle of how we transform our mortality and sinfulness into something beautiful that will live on and turn to infinity. In this world of painting, temporality takes on new characteristics; transience and timelessness, finitude and endlessness take on colour, form and become tools for making sense of reality.

Art is the attainability of developing the impossible. It gives form, colour, sound to the inexpressible from which our flimsy, unreliable world is assembled. We surrender ourselves to a new reality that is beyond the reach of our everyday mind, and this surrender is only possible with the complicity of the artist, who is able to subdue time and the fluency of what is happening. The artist dares to perform a striking and arrogant act of ridiculing the cyclical finitude of the human age, transforming it into a phenomenological phenomenon endowed with the qualities of the “eternal”.

There is no provocation in Weisberg’s painting; it is a deliberate, perfect action. The colours, which seem inexpressive at first glance, provoke our interest as viewers to immerse and drown in his subjects, prompting us to the wisdom of contemplation. There is a special charm in this seemingly coldness of reflection, because it is created through the chaos and “not calmness” of the real world. At the same time, his works are heartfelt and capable of striking at the very heart. By appropriating reality, the author performs a marvellous process of perception that can make us more human. He stimulates us to perceive more acutely how many stories, sacrifices and events cost our existence today. Time gets its right to infinity and speaks to us not with dry historical paraphernalia, but with an image that can be actualised at any moment.