OLEKSII SHCHERBAK
The Planet of Giant Grasshoppers

Shcherbak's figures are often distorted, but never grotesque. They possess an unmistakable vulnerability and deep humanity, encountering grace through instability. Seeking beauty within conflict or disturbance becomes a continual balancing act - echoing something fundamental about the human condition: that certainty remains elusive, and meaning is rarely fixed. Like Beckett's protagonists who “...must go on...can't go on… go on" or Kafka's characters who inhabit realities whose logic forever eludes them, Shcherbak's characters persist not because ambiguity is resolved, but because it must be lived with. His hybrid creatures become vehicles through which emotional landscapes emerge—worlds that defy conventional logic while revealing emotional and autobiographical truths that direct representation often struggles to reach. In evoking these timeless narrative structures, Shcherbak places his work within a broader conversation about journeying—not simply as physical movement, but as a a human need, a creative necessity and a spiritual condition. His protagonists move not towards answers, but towards a deeper ambiguity, or lack of understanding where beauty and absurdity meet in the same breath.

Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Shcherbak relocated to Paris to continue his studies at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, leaving behind not only his homeland, but family who remain there still. The shadow of that rupture arguably, perhaps inevitably, accompanies these paintings, yet The Planet of Giant Grasshoppers is remarkable not because it speaks of exile, but because it speaks of continuity. The imagined world that has accompanied the artist since childhood has endured, quietly absorbing lived experience without surrendering its essential character. Here, imagination is neither a refuge from reality nor its opposite. Instead, it becomes a means of carrying experience forward, preserving continuity even as life itself is continually transformed.

Joseph Clarke, 2026

A fabulous landscape kept unfolding as imagined heroes replaced the absent ones..

By revisiting the storylines of the worlds he invented with a childhood friend, Oleksii treats fiction as a tool for navigating experience..

Turning to drawings of characters and maps created back then, the artist reworks a personal system of signs through which reality and invention gradually become inseparable..

Returning to the fearless logic of childhood, Oleksii continues to work with memory as a central element of his practice. Invented mythologies become a means of seeking connections and moments of balance amid contradictions of lived reality. .


Valeriia Vertii, 2026