Fern Flowers | Veronika Bondarenko
"My paintings explore the space between abstraction and recognition, where forms remain open, mutable, and partially legible. Working in oil on canvas, I build images through layering, glazing, abrasion, veiling, erasure, concealment, and revision, allowing forms to emerge slowly without resolving into fixed subjects. Bodies, vessels, shells, seeds, landscapes, diagrams, cosmological structures, and atmospheric spaces emerge as associations rather than stable identities.
This body of work, Threshold, considers painting as a perceptual and material encounter. Colour, surface, pattern, edge, and spatial pressure become ways of organizing sensation, attention, and symbolic charge. The paintings move between density and openness, compression and expansion, clarity and instability. Meaning is not hidden, but suspended within the relationships between marks, layers, edges, and viewing distance.
My process treats ambiguity as a constructed condition rather than an absence of clarity. I use abstraction to hold bodily sensation, cultural memory, internal states, and visual uncertainty in a form that remains active for the viewer. In Threshold, internal worlds are made materially perceptible through movement, tension, and form. The work asks how a painting can be precise without becoming closed."
Instagram: @_veronikabondarenko