Fig Tree and Swallow is the exhibition about uncertainty.

After the project about Do Po*, a city of the future, Pavlo Makov found himself in the situation where the impossibility of a confident action was accompanied by creative unrest. 'It's like the book about the future robbed me,' the artist explains his condition. He says that, having peeped in the future, he can now only go back, which he has never done before.

Self-Portrait with Swallow has become some sort of an answer to this unrest. It is the central work of the exhibition where Makov, probably for the first time since 1992, has depicted a human character together with the city landscape. It is a viewer who is in the forefront looking at a wide landscape. We can see only the back of his head by which we may recognize the painter himself. Makov makes himself a spectator of events: the buildings of Do Po city and those shaped like letters O and X form new structures, while the monstrous concrete edifice of the shopping mall in Pushkinska street in Kharkiv and barrack districts show through them like the ghosts of Do Po city.

The name of the exhibition seems to hint at the symbolical dimension and hidden meanings of the project, but it is not the case. Makov does not depict objects to encourage one to search for the right meanings hiding behind the symbolic shell. On the contrary, he is interested in object themselves with their effects of presence and moments of intensity**. And a fig tree and a swallow are not exceptions.

According to Makov, the plant got a place in his repertoire after convincing the artists with its perfection. The fig tree leaves are formed the way that '… it is impossible to imagine what may come next out of them.' While a swallow on its own made a home for itself by the painter's studio. “It's smart and very fast. It may see the nearest future. It can make a home using saliva, clay and straws, but can't fly off the earth surface…'

An important motif in Makov's works is existing on the intersection of poles: between reality and a dream, between private and public, between female and male etc. Today, we may see that uncertainty may be seized between a fig tree and a swallow.

Borys Filonenko

* Do Po author's book (IST Publishing, 2018) and Notebook without One Page exhibition (June-July 2018, ISOLATION, Kyiv / November 2018, COME IN gallery, Kharkiv)

** Borys Filonenko. Traces of Presence. Viewing Pavlo Makov's Works with Some Help from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ― Art Ukraine, 2014 ― Available at: http://artukraine.com.ua/a/sledy-prisutstviya-rassmatrivaya-raboty-pavla-makova-s-nebolshoy-pomoshchyu-ot-khansa-ulrikha-gumbrekhta/#.XPonKHvVLIU