Clear Water

Kon Trubkovich has decided to put a healthy distance between his personal history and his subject matter. That’s how the painter arrived upon the motif of William Shakespeare's Ophelia, drowning in her sadness and drowning in a river, freshly picked flowers floating around her—the morbid poetry of her story ever-ripe for artistic inspiration. Now, the resulting six paintings, depicting a variety of delicate-seeming female visages as well as a single male figure, are debuting at The Journal Gallery in New York.

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The eponymously titled series represents a major departure in the practice of the Russian-born, New York-based artist. For his 2021 show “The Antepenultimate End,” Trubkovich mined visuals related to the political turmoil of his childhood in his home country, as filtered through a TV set. The works at Gagosian included paintings depicting televised glimpses of Moscow just after the collapse of the Soviet Union; another pair of works captured a 2015 fistfight between Russian separatists and Ukrainian nationalists in Ukrainian parliament. Such pieces were emblematic of his oeuvre up to that point in how they brought to life emotionally gripping news stories to which he felt personally connected. Conversely, in “Ophelia,” the iconic Shakespeare persona becomes a stand-in for all those who feel virtually powerless in watching the order upholding their lives dissolve into chaos. “I was thinking about the archetype of the innocent bystander, the world kind of spinning out around this character, and driving them to madness,” says Trubkovich. 

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In their portraits, solemn-faced young women, some teary-eyed, are flanked by flowers—and, in one instance, alongside an Ophelia with flowing Pre-Raphaelite-style red hair, a skull, hovering above her shoulder. Trubkovich’s signature are the darts of TV static that he paints from a real-life analog TV, on which he plays his source material via video cassette. Here, the static imposed across the faces of the Ophelias also evoke ripples in the water, both serving as something of a barricade between viewer and figure.

Despite the character’s tragedy, Trubkovich made the choice to envision his Ophelias as pillars of strength; this is in contrast to the single male figure in the show, who is “literally teetering on the edge of a ravine,” he points out. “Ophelia is considered to be the archetype of innocence or beauty or whatnot. But I try to flip it around a little bit in these, where the male archetype is unsteady and protected and or needs protection and the female character seems to be the more defined one.”

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The more symbolic nature of the subject matter is not the only significant break from Trubkovish’s previous artistic endeavors: The visuals in “Ophelia” are the products of his imagination. Prior to this show, all of his imagery was appropriated from newsreels and other sources in the public domain. “I took a month to just sit around and draw without any preconceived desire to accomplish anything,” he explains. He then used a program called The Unreal Engine to render his drawings in 3-D. “It really was like a theater,” the artist describes of his approach, “like a play. There’s that reference of building stages and building actors and putting them onto the stage.” 

Looking back, Trubkovish concedes that this crucial change to his typical process has made the undertaking a soul-searching one after all. “It’s such a personal show, because it comes from my drawings,” he says. “When you draw, there’s very little barrier between the artist and what he’s making. There’s almost none. It’s such a direct way of communicating.” To the extent that Ophelia, whose sorrowful demise—in all of its unfairness—has captivated audiences of theater and art for centuries, can act as a universal symbol, then each new rendition of her ultimately is a reflection of its artist. Trubkovish’s Ophelias command a penetrating gaze, made all the more mysterious by the gentle blues, violets, and grays of his palette. Those eyes have seen a lot, you think. And, with all they remember, they’re not easy to forget.‍

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“Ophelia” is on view through October 30, 2024 at The Journal Gallery at 45 White St, New York, NY 10013.