"DEARCHIVING" series
 
Vintage black and white photographs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries became the basis for a series of large-format paintings. The photos themselves in this series can be divided into two groups. The first are photos taken in photo studios, so popular at that time in every European city. These are so-called office photos. The plot refers to parsun portraits. The genre of art, which has a history of several thousand years, still exists, changing depending on aesthetic preferences, social statuses, and the worldviews of customers. These photos come mostly from the artist's family archive, as well as from the collections of antiquities collectors. The second group is portraits of models. A series of postcards depicting the beauties of the Miss Europe contest, which took place in Paris in 1930. Each girl in these photos represented her country in Europe at the time. The plot refers to the genre of a psychological artistic portrait. Here the photographer tried to reveal individuality as much as possible to show through a portrait the very personality of each girl and used the means and technologies available to him at that time for this purpose.
The canvas carefully reproduces not only every detail of the image itself, but also the abrasions, discoloration, and crumpled surfaces of the photographs themselves. Thus, photography, being an illusory imprint of light on paper, gets picturesque materiality and texture. Photographs, which are a testimony to the past, the culture of that time, become material for a deeper study of the concepts of memory and decline. Finished paintings begin their journey, live their lives. The artist deliberately leaves them on the floor of his studio to collect accidental abrasions, scratches, stains, layers of paint. In this way he fuses the conscious process of copying and chance, the predictable irrational and traces of his biography, to show through the picture this relentless transformation in time. It brings thoughts about the time which is constantly grinding the human past, erasing something from our memory, discolouring memories and leaving in it some hints, fragments, surviving remains.

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"MONO" series

The "MONO" series is something on the border of graphics, plastics and printed textures. Shimmering silver or gold veil, through the breakthroughs of which you can see the movement of coloured mass. The effect is achieved by combining metallic paint with silky-matte acrylic. There is a visual tactility and at the same time, there is a desire to look behind a thin metal web and see what's behind it, in the depths, on a white surface of the paper.

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"SHADOWS" series

... a meditative contemplation of the passages of time that grinds our past, intertwines people's destinies, erases something from the memory. It's like the intricacies of decor on antique, well-worn carpets or someone's look through scratches on old photos…


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"FACES" series

In art, new movements don’t emerge quietly—they push forward when existing forms lose their charge and begin to hollow out from within. Much of twentieth-century practice, from the avant-garde to postmodernism, turned away from the human figure, dissolving it into abstraction or reducing it to the object logic of pop. In doing so, it opened vast conceptual territories—yet often at the cost of immediacy, drifting into a language increasingly closed off to the viewer. What follows is not a rejection, but a return: back to the human, to lived reality, to an anthropocentric focus long anticipated by Joseph Beuys.

This shift finds a clear and compelling expression in Liubomyr Yakymchuk’s recent body of work. After years of exploring abstraction and the material presence of paint—its surface, density, and structure—he turns decisively toward portraiture. But these are not portraits in any conventional sense. Identity here is stripped of anecdote and individuality, distilled into an archetype. His figures resist specificity; they echo one another, forming a quiet, unsettling uniformity.

This sameness is deliberate. In a world saturated with images and constant digital exchange, recognition begins to erode. We appear distinct, yet increasingly function as a collective blur—connected, but unable to truly see one another. The face, once the site of inner depth and singular presence, flattens within the logic of screen-based communication. In turning away from one another, we imagine we are gaining time—yet what slips away is something far more essential.

Yakymchuk’s work holds this tension. It is unmistakably contemporary, yet it leans toward the past—toward the restraint of fresco, the clarity of line, the discipline of tonal balance. There is no excess here, no noise. Instead, his paintings slow the viewer down. They create space—for stillness, for attention, for reflection. In the midst of acceleration, they insist on a pause.