Butterflies is a series of six large-format figurative paintings united by a shared visual grammar. Each canvas depicts a single figure in close-up portrait - not a face, but a presence. The head of each figure is half-obscured by a different object: bandages, barbed wire, internet cables, an ammunition belt, gold chains, a funeral ribbon. Each holds something in their mouth. Each is attended by butterflies of a specific accent color. The backgrounds are atmospheric, abstract, textured - layered paint over layered silence.The series was conceived in response to the ongoing war in Ukraine, and to the six types of human presence that war most clearly reveals: the child who loses childhood, the prisoner of conscience, the person trapped inside propaganda, the soldier who learns to live with violence, the official who profits from catastrophe, and the mother who survives the unsurvivable.

The butterfly is the only element shared across all six works. It appears not as a symbol of hope, but as what remains of freedom when everything else has been taken. It is the one thing in these paintings that still moves.

acrylic / 70×100 cm / 2026

Вкрадене дитинство

Stolen Childhood

A girl’s head is wrapped in white bandages - wound as identity, injury worn on the outside.In her mouth, a lollipop: the sweetness of childhood rendered as placeholder, occupying the space where words should be.The background is dark rose, haunted by elements drawn in a child’s hand - suns, smileys, the visual grammar of innocence now displaced.Pink butterflies.The bandage does not only cover injury. It covers the future.

Свобода слова

Freedom of Speech

A figure entangled in barbed wire and chains. Handcuffs hang at the ears - grotesque jewelry, restraint performed as ornament.The mouth is sealed with construction tape: not silence, but enforced silence, the difference between the two now lost.Yellow butterflies, the color of light that does not enter.The painting asks: how long can a person be silenced before the silence becomes the person?

Інфо бульбашка

Info Bubble

The head is wrapped in cables — internet wires, or perhaps noodles.The visual pun is deliberate: in Ukrainian, to hang noodles on someone’s ears is to deceive them. In the mouth: a bubblegum bubble, pink and swollen, sealed shut.The background is dark blue. Blue butterflies. Everything here is soft, sticky, inflated, and false.The bubble is not a bubble of thought - it is a bubble of unreality, round and tight and about to pop.

Аперитив миру

Aperitif of Peace

A soldier wears an ammunition belt arranged like a crown - violence as laurel, war as distinction.The mouth holds a bullet with casual indifference: not fear, but familiarity. The face says this is normal now.Black and grey butterflies - the colors of ash.This is a person who has learned to live with war in his mouth and stopped noticing the taste.

Слуга народу

Servant of the People

Gold chains wrap the head; banknotes protrude like laurels.The teeth are black with oil - the resource that funds both states and their wars. The face smiles broadly. Money as portrait, corruption as ornament, power as self-portrait. This figure’s butterflies,if any remain, were purchased long ago and pinned behind glass.

Герої [не] вмирають

Heroes [Don’t] Die

A mother. Her head is wrapped in a funeral ribbon - we remember, we love, we grieve.Her palm is open, upturned - the gesture of someone who held something and has just let it go, or had it taken. She looks at what has left her hand.This is the only painting in the series without an object in the mouth, because there are no words for this. The only figure that reaches toward something outside the frame.The only one watching what we cannot see. Her butterfly is white.

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