Digits

Pavlo Kovach with Waldemar Tatarczuk Numbers (detail) acrylic on canvas, 2025 Pavlo Kovach serves in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He works at headquarters, where his responsibilities include handling cases of soldiers reported missing at the front. Each such disappearance is assigned a specific registration number. Kovach, who did not abandon his artistic practice after being mobilised, has invoked these numbers in his artistic actions, inscribing them, among other places, on laurel leaves. The painting presented in the exhibition is the result of a collaboration in which Waldemar Tatarczuk assumed the role of executor of a painterly scenario developed by Pavlo Kovach. The work refers both to Kovach's own artistic practice and to the work of the Polish artist Roman Opałka (1931–2011). In the mid-1960s, Opałka initiated a painting project entitled OPALKA 1965 / 1 –, referred to by the artist himself and by critics as the 'Programme'. He continued this project for three and a half decades, until his death. As part of the 'Programme' Opałka painted consecutive numbers in white paint on canvases, beginning with the numeral "1." The first painting was executed on a black background; in subsequent works, he continued the count on grey grounds that gradually grew lighter with each new canvas, moving steadily toward white. In accordance with Kovach's concept, Tatarczuk works on a canvas of the same format – 196 × 135 cm – used by Opałka. He repeats the gesture of painting numbers in white, but transforms its meaning. In Opałka's work, counting had an existential dimension: the paintings functioned as personal clocks measuring the artist's own passing time. In the work created through the collaboration between Kovach and Tatarczuk, each number conceals a different person, their drama and unknown fate; within the abstract digits is inscribed a landscape of contemporary, war-torn Ukraine. (Stach Szabłowski)