There is something arresting about the wall in Andrii Kateryniuk’s Through the Shadows. It is not just a surface, but a living, breathing expanse: soft, dappled, and luminous. The light seems to shift across it as though clouds were passing, and within that glow, a figure stands quietly, absorbed in her own stillness. Her shadow, dark and gentle, leans beside her like a silent companion. The wall becomes a veil between the visible and invisible worlds, a threshold between the tactile and the spiritual.
It is the wall that draws me in first. Its marbled tones and mottled light recall both the sky and the interior of a mind. It becomes an atmosphere rather than a structure. It feels less like paint and more like captured air. Kateryniuk’s choice of linen as his ground intensifies this effect. Linen has a softness that absorbs light differently from canvas; its weave is delicate, porous, and alive. The way oil paint settles into those fibers creates a depth that feels organic, almost like skin. It is as if the painting itself breathes. In this work, that quality of the medium becomes inseparable from the subject: the fragility of perception, the way light and matter interpenetrate.
The figure, turned inward, seems to exist in dialogue with her own shadow. The composition suggests solitude, but not loneliness. There is a quiet dignity in her stance, a contemplative inwardness. Her shadow stretches before her, sharper and more certain than the woman herself. It is as if her truest self lives in the silhouette. Jung might have called this the moment of reconciliation with the shadow: the encounter with the unseen self that shapes the contours of consciousness. But there is nothing psychological in Kateryniuk’s execution that feels clinical. It is poetic. The darkness here is gentle, honest, and necessary.
I think about how light defines us only through what it cannot reach. The brighter the illumination, the more distinct the shadow. To stand through the shadows, as the title suggests, is to move beyond fear of them. It is to accept that clarity and obscurity coexist. In this sense, the painting becomes a meditation on awareness itself: how we see ourselves reflected, distorted, and deepened by the conditions of light that surround us.
Kateryniuk’s work recalls the quiet interiors of Hammershøi and the luminous spirituality of La Tour, but his wall—this astonishing wall of linen and pigment—transcends imitation. It becomes the heart of the work, a space of revelation. The woman is not the subject but the participant in an act of becoming. Through the delicate shimmer of the linen, we witness something intimate and ineffable: the moment when a human being stands, alone, before her own light, and recognizes herself in the shadow.