Anton Saenko
‘Heads’ series, 2025, oil, paper
‘Gryazne’ series, 2022–2024, lightbox, 4 х 40 x 40 cm
Anton works with photography, land art, performance, object, installation and environment, but he himself describes painting as his main medium of practice—it is close to the questions painters of the past century asked themselves when trying to grasp the essence of the image. Anton reflects on the problem of form and how this form becomes a language; thematically and narratively, he focuses primarily on the landscape, which he explores through different media.
The landscapes presented in works of art are no less important than the material landscape itself. Each constitutes a part of the awareness of who we are. Anton admits that his greatest wish is to go into the open air in his family places, which are now on the frontline. The continuous shelling and the russian army’s offensive in Sumy Oblast have made life in this region extremely dangerous—Saenko’s Ukrainian family borderland, where his village of Hryazne is located, is gradually becoming part of the theatre of war. Anton deliberately avoids including a human figure in the landscape so as not to divert the viewer’s attention from painterly concerns to a narrative that emerges with a storyline. Yet one of Saenko’s newest cycles is heads—deliberately awkward, ugly, ‘simply stinking’. The value of such painting lies in creating a space for the release of emotions: ‘I want to put into it such energy, such a brushstroke, as if unrepeatable, impossible to reproduce opportunistically’. Heads without a landscape are like icon paintings.
