Special Space: dialog between Mariko Helman and Oleksii Revika. When space becomes something more.

Their joint exhibition “Special Space” exhibited at Imagine Point Gallery is a profound artistic experiment that invites a dialog with space in its most diverse forms.

Mariko Helman works with delicate materials, such as ballpoint pens and watercolors, and creates works that resemble fragile visions immersed in the light and shadows of human consciousness. She explores the contradictions of human nature, reflecting the balance between mythical worldviews and conscious reality. 

One of the series presented at the exhibition, #TheSecondComing, was a response to social deprivation and the search for new points of support.

The paintingм “ Gabriel mowing, or the Annunciation is canceled” is particularly revealing, in which the archangel Gabriel appears not as a bearer of good news, but as a harbinger of inevitable changes, where reality turns the sacred into the mundane. This work is a vivid metaphor for the new era, where familiar symbols acquire new, often disturbing meanings.

Oleksii Revika, on the other hand, addresses the topic of personal transformation and human interaction with his fears, hopes, and reality.

The artist works in the unique genre of semantic surrealism, creating paintings that resemble fragments of dreams.

His works are full of symbols that allow viewers to immerse themselves in a complex world of semi-real images.

The artist's “Special Space” is a response to the challenges of our time, a space in which war and violence force people to make decisions, to act, and not to remain bystanders.

His work "PARADISE" where a chicken with a laurel sprig sits on the back of a frightened man, protecting himself with his hands, is a painful allusion to the vulnerability of human existence. "PACT" is a profound commentary on a society that consumes the idea of peace, leaving it no chance of survival.

Continuing with the theme of space, Revika changes her point of view in her new series: she turns to the personal dimension — what remains when the world outside becomes unpredictable.

In the series "Special Space", the boundaries are expanded: they are revealed through broken perspectives, slightly distorted shapes, a sense of cramped or, on the contrary, unlimited space. In these works, the artist reveals the world as he sees it through the eyes of a person trying to order the chaos around him, to understand the nature of change.

Despite their different styles and artistic approaches, Mariko Helman and Oleksii Revika engage in a deep dialogue through their works. At its centre is the question of the nature of space and its meaning. They invite the viewer to think about how space can become a carrier of memory, how it is shaped by social and political circumstances, how the past, present and future coexist in it.

"Special Space" is a visual manifesto that makes us look into our own reality and search for new meanings in familiar things: a floral dress, an old grapefruit, a Renaissance icon, a noisy city.

Helman and Revika remind us that space is always marked by experience, memory and historical context.

Art today is a means of self-expression and a tool for deep analyses of the world we live in. And this is the undeniable power and significance of the ‘"Special Space".

Daria Pozhydaeva,

art critic and art manager at Imagine Point gallery