Matvey Vaisberg: "Who am I without my paintings?"

What is it like to paint amid the cannonade of shelling, to transform the wreckage of enemy drones into Ukrainian artifacts, and to preserve the memory of looted museums? Artist Matviy Vaisberg reflects on the inherent healing power of drawing, the magic of the craft, a dialogue with the classics, and why no catastrophe can completely destroy human memory. 

I’ve read a lot of your interviews. In them, you say that artists change the world. How exactly does that happen?

Well, look. It’s not even a metaphor—it’s a fact, I’d say. Le Corbusier, the great architect from whom virtually all modern architecture stems, said that it arose from a single Cubist still life by Picasso. Without Malevich’s “Black Square,” the world would be different—believe me. Try looking at sunflowers through eyes other than Van Gogh’s—I can’t do it. Or at water lilies through eyes other than Claude Monet’s. I think everyone changes the world in their own way, but for me, the example of artists is the most obvious.

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SCREENSHOT: Intent’s YouTube channel

What, in your opinion, is the main function of an artist today? I don’t just want to ask this question; I want to return to Rothko’s manifesto, which you reposted on your Facebook page. If we consider his words about the viewer seeing the world in their own way (that is, you as an artist see it one way, and the viewer sees it another—and that’s normal), how does that relate to the present day?

I think that art in general—and contemporary art in particular—gives the viewer freedom of interpretation. It’s a different matter when people say something silly; they have the right to do that too, but it has nothing to do with the painting or the artwork. Even old works take on new meanings over time. We forget some meanings (or they fall out of historical context), while others emerge—and that’s how it should be.

In general, in my view, art—and painting in particular—is the most human-made message to the future. A painting (and I’m an artist who mainly works with paintings, creating on a flat surface) is an obvious message to the future. Moreover, it has temporal properties. It is painted now. And as soon as you finish it, it remains in the past, but its direction points toward the future. Because, most likely, it will outlive its creator.

That’s how we send these messages. It’s good when they’re seen during the artist’s lifetime. We were taught back in art school: “Artists are recognized after death.” Well, okay, it was a decent school in the sense that you just paint.

Recently there was a strange debate on Facebook where some of my friends said they wanted to destroy their work in a few years. I wrote to them: “Guys, don’t deprive yourselves of a chance at immortality.” Regardless of whether you’re a believer or not (I, for example, am not a believer).

I had a friend. It was a long time ago; he’s old enough now to be not just my son, but my grandson. And before he passed away (he was 21), he burned all his artwork. I found his brother; they gave me some of his schoolwork, and only one piece of his adult work remained. In my opinion, he was a brilliantly gifted person. Every time I talk about this, I’m trying to keep his memory alive. But if his works had survived—if he hadn’t destroyed them and if they’d been preserved—it would have been so much better.

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SCREENSHOT: Intent’s YouTube channel

In this sense, being an artist is both a profession and a craft—I insist on this. Because a gesture is beautiful, but skill and effort are very important for what I do.

How do you understand an artist’s freedom during wartime? Is there a line between inner freedom and civic responsibility?

Everyone has their own principles. During the Maidan in 2014, I went there as a person, as a citizen. I couldn’t even think about painting—it just felt shameful. But after a while, I began to capture it all with my eyes.

When I realized the time had come, I understood what kind of series it would be. I had an Old Testament series, and I realized it was the same story: we’re fleeing from the pharaoh—only 3,000 years have passed. And when the so-called ceasefire began, I went to the studio because I realized I’d be more useful there (taking breaks to go to Maidan).

It really depends on the artist’s personality. For some people, it throws them off, and they can’t paint. Why did I mention the “Maidan series”? Since I’d already had that experience, I knew I could paint—that this was art of direct action.

When I was drawing my “Travel Diary” at the start of the full-scale invasion… It just so happened that I was away from home for several months. I suffered greatly because of it; I wanted to run back home at any moment. And I kept this diary. First, it was my way of coping; second, I was sustained by the hope that this wasn’t just for me (I was posting these works online). And then they told me, “Yes, we’ve been waiting for them.”

When I finally returned to Kyiv in May 2022, the city was still half-empty. In our writers’ house, I counted five windows that were lit up at night. And I immediately put together an exhibition of this “Travel Diary.” Some people just cried. 

I’ve talked a lot about this, but what other words can I use if that’s how it really was? When we ended up abroad in Poland, they looked at me as if I were crazy because I wanted to run back, into the bombs… They told me, “Let’s go—we’ll buy you some art supplies.” I was picking things out and, among other things, grabbed 100 sheets of black A4 paper. And we were only going to be gone for a week or two. And I realized with horror: until I’d painted them all, I wouldn’t be going back. That’s pretty much how it turned out. There really is some kind of artistic intuition after all.

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SCREENSHOT: Intent’s YouTube channel

When I was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for a few months, there was a discussion: Is God more of a writer or an artist? During the debate, we decided that He is, after all, an artist—that creation is an artistic act. “In the beginning was the Word”—that came later, from the Gospel and Christian motifs. But if we go back to the very beginning (the creation of the world, the seven days, and so on), it’s clear that there was hardly a clear plan. There’s research now suggesting that a subatomic particle has the same free will as a human being. So the world builds itself, but we can influence it. It’s indeterminate, and we’re the ones shaping it. It seems to me that an artist also plays a part in this.

Has your understanding of beauty changed since 2022? Can beauty exist alongside catastrophe?

My understanding of beauty has always been nuanced: I’ve distinguished between “beautiful” and “pretty.” The gnarled hands of Rembrandt’s old women are more beautiful to me than those of Boucher (who is also a fine artist) with his putti.

For me, Picasso’s *Guernica* is the most important painting of the 20th century. When I saw it in Madrid, I ran through the streets just like in that joke: “I saw *Guernica*!” It had been my dream since I was about 12.

I really love Goya. When I was working on the “Maidan Series,” he was the most important artist to me. And it just so happened that six months earlier, I’d seen Goya’s originals at the Prado. If that hadn’t happened, my series would have been different.

Some might say that Goya is terrifying. But his dedication, mastery, artistry, and craftsmanship take the edge off those terrifying elements. As a friend of mine once said, “The deadly is alluring.” When I saw Maidan—especially at night, when it was truly terrifying—I’d never seen anything more beautiful. It was like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

On the one hand, painting is a craft—you often talk about that. But when does the craft end and the magic begin—that mystery that’s impossible to explain?

When I meet with young artists, college students, or high schoolers (I don’t teach, but I sometimes hold meetings) and they ask me about technique, I say: the most interesting thing to discuss regarding technique is when it becomes a language. After all, we don’t think about how we construct sentences when we’re speaking. The next stage is the level of that conversation.

Paint is like words; a line is like intonation. Paint and line are how you speak and reshape the world.

I tell young people: “You’ve come here… It’s pretty hard to think about a career here—if you can even call it a profession at all. But it’s like setting sail from Odesa in a ship without a rudder or sails, and you don’t know your destination. But you’re happy to do this.” Because it really is happiness. Everyone who knows me will confirm: I might be feeling down, but when I pick up a brush, I instantly forget everything.

Art is healing. It really is. There was a time when we went to Auschwitz. For me, what Adorno wrote about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz ceased to be a figure of speech. I stopped painting. For a few weeks or a month, I didn’t touch my paints.

But then I saw a painting by a friend of mine. There’s this wonderful artist, Ahad Jamal—a close friend of mine who lives in Kyiv (he’s originally from Sukhumi and has been on the run from Putin ever since). I saw his painting “Black Cherries” and felt as if I’d taken medicine.

I started looking through the photos I’d taken at the concentration camp and found one where there was a small speck in the sky. I zoomed in, and it turned out to be a bird. I ran to my studio and painted a large canvas titled “Bird Over Birkenau.” That’s how this story ended. In a physical sense, art truly heals—I’m certain of that.

Your “Studies” series is a long-standing dialogue with the masters of the past. When you reinterpret a classical subject with your signature expressive brushstrokes, are you arguing with the original artist, hiding behind them from reality, or trying to bring them into our time? What’s happening?

If you look at a beautiful landscape and want to paint it, you paint it. For me, this goes back to my childhood: when my mother enrolled in art school, we got some books, and I began looking at reproductions. For me, a reproduction is just as much a window to the world as a real window. And if I get an impulse—a “blow to the eyes”—I try to express that formula of beauty in a free-flowing way. It’s a kind of dialogue.

I didn’t come up with this whole “studio” concept myself, but I really like it. I borrowed the word “study” from Francis Bacon. He has a series based on Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, and it’s labeled “study.” I really liked that definition.

I remember when they used to publish the “Great Artists” series—thin little books, not very high quality in terms of printing. But that suited me even better than perfect albums, because it stripped away the unnecessary details. The internet wasn’t widespread back then, and I’d think, “Oh, I’ll go ahead and draw a Rembrandt or someone else today.”

As for my most recent studies… When I was abroad, at first I didn’t even allow myself to visit museums. I’d tell myself, “I’m a reluctant tourist; I’m in exile; I want to go home.” I saw only Ukrainian flags (there were a lot of them in Munich back then). Until I ended up at the Pinakothek and realized. Although I’m not a Christian, for me the story of Christ’s Passion is the most universal way for everyone to understand what’s happening in Ukraine right now: suffering, love, dignity.

I saw Albrecht Altdorfer’s painting *The Crucifixion* and was deeply moved by it. I thought that those times weren’t exactly peaceful either when it was painted: the Sudeten Wars, the religious wars, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation… And in the end, one of my studies was titled “In Memory of Bucha.” Because I drew the first sketches while the events in Bucha were unfolding. And Bucha is where I spent my childhood; there were Pioneer camps there. I don’t know how many summers I spent there, playing soccer, chess… For me, it was very personal.

Has it ever happened that, years later, one of your works revealed something to you that you weren’t aware of at the time you created it?

Several people have told me that my works reveal even more over time. For example, I have a piece—a self-portrait with my son playing chess. Those were difficult times; I emerged from them, and over time, the painting takes on new, surprising qualities. This is Roman Balayan’s favorite painting. He tells me, “That’s how you should paint! Why isn’t it in the Louvre?”—“Roman Gurghenovich, are you asking me that?”

Even when I take out my old works, I see that they speak volumes. We change, and so do our perspectives. A work of art is a snapshot in time. You can’t change it, but it speaks to us. That’s the message to the future I was talking about.

What’s your day like now? How do you find the silence necessary for work amid the noise of shelling and sirens?

It’s very strange. In Kyiv, we’re terrorized mainly at night. But in the morning, you get up and go to paint. And you see people sitting in cafes, going about their business—my friends are painting. That’s how we live, and that’s how we survive.

I first saw something like this during the Second Intifada in Jerusalem: a café was blown up, and literally within a few days, people were sitting there again. I asked, “How is that possible?” They said, “We won’t let them change our way of life.”

It’s the same in Odessa: we were running just a moment ago—there was a “shahid” attack—and I saw the impact marks for the first time. Yet people are still walking around.

You once said that color is an inner tuning fork. What’s resonating with you right now, in 2026? Which color dominates?

When there’s a lot of blue and light blue, a sense of hope emerges for me. Of course, dark times give rise to dark works.

It’s strange: I was starting a “green period,” and then people asked why it ended so quickly. I had a tube of green paint that I’d never seen before. I lost it—and my green phase was over! Why green? Just like my mom loved to quote Marc Chagall. When he was asked why the faces in his paintings were green, he replied, “Because the shadow of my heart fell upon them.” That’s one way to look at it.

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SCREENSHOT: Intent’s YouTube channel

I saw on Facebook that you painted a Russian drone. Tell me how you felt physically and mentally.

I don’t want to swear… A friend of mine brought it to me. He’s fighting near Kherson himself and wanted to give it to his command as a gift. I thought for a long time about what to do with it. I didn’t want to do anything silly.

I decided to print my linocuts on it—featuring an angel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, an angel of the Air Defense Forces, and birds. To turn a Russian drone into a Ukrainian artifact. At the same time, I left all their technical labels intact: “Do not touch with hands,” and so on.

I’d like to talk about the exhibition “Kherson: Not Stolen,” where we’re speaking now. When did you first realize that a museum’s legacy is vulnerable and that art can be physically stolen and hauled away by the truckload, as happened in Kherson?

I realized this at the start of the invasion. And even before that, when Crimea was seized, we simply didn’t talk much about the fact that the Simferopol Museum had been captured. But now we see works from the Kherson Museum at the Tavrida Museum in Simferopol. 

As for this exhibition, it was an initiative by a few people. Since I had a series of homages and studies, we suggested that artists create studies of the lost works. And almost everyone in our artistic circle responded.

The project is ongoing. This is already the fourth exhibition, following Lviv, Kyiv, and Toronto; next is Odesa, then Vinnytsia, and perhaps Norway.

If you had the opportunity to save just one painting from destruction in any museum in the world, which one would you choose?

I’d go to save people. After all, human life is more important.

As an artist, I’m a vulnerable person. There was an incident once. I was preparing for an exhibition. The works were stored in a building that someone wanted to set on fire. I realized I could end up with no artistic legacy. Who am I without my paintings? I was most afraid for the self-portrait of me and my son playing chess, because it tells the story of my son, my father—who was a chess player—and my own.

Do you ever feel afraid that everything we love will eventually be stolen or forgotten? And what will be left then?

It won’t be forgotten. Human memory is very resilient. We’re reading texts right now that were written 3,000 years ago, and we find meaning in them.

And if nothing remains, then there will be a blank slate. Stanisław Lem has a story—which sounds quite modern—about how drones created a magnetic field, and the human brain was left blank, without any memories. Well, then a blank mind will remain.

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