Black Cherries

This mysterious title reminding one of the famous romance, The Black Eyes, Kyiv-based artist Yevheniya Hapchynska gave to her one-woman show at the Sribni dzvony [Silver bells] Gallery. Hapchynska’s gracious, slightly mincing, refined, and ironical painting is indubitably and even emphatically woman’s, though any analogies with women’s magazines and women’s logic would be in this case ambiguous and knotty. Anyway, this time, the artist confesses, the source for her inspiration were Mariyka Burmaka’s songs.

The world of Yevheniya Hapchynska — at least the one of the Black Cherries — belongs to the heroines, their flowers, and their toys. Here heroes are rather the exception, while the cheerful male self-confidence (Lords of the Snails) or melancholy (Vorobioff) equally moves away to the background, faced with the stormily created and even more stormily solved purely women’s problems: dancing slippers, make-up, tea with cakes, teddy-bears, and goldfishes (Tea with Cakes, Murmur of the Adriatic). Hapchynska’s heroines are girlish women with an amazing self-respect. They are funny, touching, and charming at the same time. Occasionally they wear fairytale pseudo-historical costumes (The Lady with a Pig), but more often they are rather modern — of course, only in terms of their attire and accessories, since in all other ways these pompous and slightly sad dreamers are beyond time (Miu-Miu, Don’t Give Me Presents, Give me Your Love, or Stewardesses of the Paper Planes). However, there is an essential detail distinguishing Hapchynska’s heroines from women’s magazines’ inhabitants: they all have little semi-transparent wings on their backs (The Favorite Morning Coffee, Everything Like You Wanted) — as well as their pet dogs and even pigs.