Oleksii Shcherbak

Borrowing its title from Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel, On the Road emphasises a similar flow of unfiltered thought and perception that is felt throughout Kerouac’s text. Shcherbak’s works are not portraits in the traditional sense, but rather composite impressions of mysterious, unstable forms that capture moments of becoming rather than being.

In this sense, Shcherbak’s documentarian joins a lineage of literary wayfarers, from Homer’s Odysseus to James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom. Like these figures, he moves through an ever-shifting terrain where the boundaries between the real and the unreal dissolve. The Odyssey provides a mythic backdrop: a journey of delay, longing, and transformation where each stop reveals strange creatures and spiritual trials. In James Joyce’s modern reimagining of the tale, Ulysses, Joyce maps the epic onto the ordinary, collapsing time and myth into a single Dublin day, and Shcherbak too fuses the epic with the intimate. His painted forms mirror how the human mind, fatigued from wandering, can conjure its own pantheon of personal archetypes – inner Cyclopes, Sirens, and shape-shifting gods that reflect fears, desires, memories, and revelations.

Through fluid, symbolic masses and mythological motifs, Shcherbak dissects the absurdity and grace of transformation. The heroes in his work are less individuals and more vessels of collective memory and subconscious experience. Their identities are shaped and reshaped by physical exhaustion, internal contradiction, and encounters with the sublime.

“One of the works is the story of a couple who stopped along the way, as they were so impressed by the view. But slowly they forgot about time. The man became a turtle, and the woman started turning into stone. I have depicted them becoming one with their environment.”

Implicit in Shcherbak’s art are scenes of absurdist transformations. The artist goes as far to state that transformation itself is an absurd act, as such moments of flux resist classification and logic. Shcherbak is particularly drawn to these contradictions, where clarity dissolves and emotional dissonance rises to the surface. His figures are often distorted, but never grotesque. Imbued with vulnerability (something deeply human) their forms carry a grace that emerges through instability.

Finding grace within absurdity is not an easy resolution, but a balancing act. It echoes the existential condition itself: to live with the knowledge that meaning is never fixed. Much like Samuel Beckett’s figures who “can’t go on, but go on,” or Kafka’s protagonists who navigate systems they’ll never understand, Shcherbak’s characters persist in their transformations. His hybrid creatures are tools for this expression, allowing him to construct emotional topographies that defy logic but speak to a deeper psychological truth.

In evoking these timeless narrative structures, Shcherbak places his work within a broader conversation about journeying as a human need, as a spiritual metaphor, and as a creative act.  His protagonists walk not toward answers, but toward deeper ambiguity, where beauty and absurdity meet in the same breath.