Anton Saenko

In his artistic practice, Saenko consistently explores the topic of space, aiming to find a more abstract and pristine representation of it. This led him to working with landscapes and researching power relations between the artist himself and the land as his object. Eventually, all attempts to rein in nature end with total capitulation of the artistic figure: it merges into the environment, becoming a part of the landscape.

This artwork invites the viewer into a gloomy and dismal room with a rectangle on the wall opposing the entrance. The rectangle is neither a painting, nor a screen, nor an object in general: it is a frame, a window into the void from which sounds are coming. It might be an audio recording playing on a loop or an artist himself playing piano and singing a poem by Vasyl Stus, the Ukrainian poet repressed by the Soviet Union, “In autumn, let grass burn…”.

Saenko creates his landscape as a spatial painting by using light, shadow and sound as artistic tools. Attempting to deprive the artwork of objectivity and seeking freedom from cultural prescriptions, the artist abandons the market-driven forms of art.