This is the title of a joint exhibition by artists Dmytro Kavsan and Yaroslava Chernomorets at the Irena Gallery. This somewhat melancholic title was given to the exhibition by its creators and obviously is beyond discussion. However, the cities created by the artists do not seem vanishing but rather appear like a vision, reminiscence, or a dream.
In Yaroslava Chernomorets’s works these manifold phenomena are demonstrated in a somewhat excessively plain and concrete manner. The occasion for creating a whimsical Indian shrine or familiar Kyiv cathedral can be given form from an exotic incense, a glass of wine, or poetical line symbolized by a paper scroll and goose feather. With Dmytro Kavsan things are more interesting and complex. His watercolors are brilliant. But what is most unexpected is the transformation of the author of the rather hedonistic Seducing Still Lifes into a romantic and almost mystical longing for the unattainable land where ghosts of lovers wander under the shadow of half-ruined columns and Gothic cathedrals, and valleys with precious ancient towns are seen from mountain tops. Speaking about vanishing, in Kavsan’s works it turns out rather an oblivion — painful and irreparable — of something very personal, endlessly significant, and dear, intangibly and indubitably similar to the ruins of a Greek temple in the morning mist or innumerable pinnacles of a Gothic cathedral under the rain.
