autumn 2025, mixed technique
“I miss (?) my old life” is a collection of paintings created by artist Vlad Melnyk during short military leaves and brief trips to Kyiv, where his studio is located.
The fragmentary nature of his artistic practice has shaped the visual language of these works: unlike his earlier abstract canvases, they incorporate figurative elements, personal narratives, and imagery drawn from memory and association.
This shift reflects the transformation of the artist himself, who has been serving in the Air Forces of Ukraine since 2023.
Melnyk’s paintings contain traces of civilian life and recollections of childhood, where abstract strokes gradually evolve into naïve figurative forms—assembled from fragments of memory, as if from a child’s dreams.
The carefree life of the past, once perceived as natural, is now reinterpreted by the artist as a kind of recklessness—a moral fragility that made today’s world vulnerable to violence.
In response to the question, “What are your works about?”, Vlad wrote the following letter:
I miss (?) my old life.
It’s an ode to carefree times. To stolen youth. To nights without curfews, without air raid alarms, without military shifts. To sunrises I once greeted with friends, back when they were all still around—before dissolving into black-and-white photographs and obituaries in my social media feed, before they leaving with no way back.
It’s an ode to hot pepperoni pizza I could order at 3 am, and which I sometimes miss so much in the army canteen. To the silly doodles on a school desk that probably still decorate Ms. Liliya Ivanivna’s classroom on the second floor of school №137 in Dnipro.
To the honey cake my grandmother used to bake every December in my innocent childhood, when the only bad news was the $ exchange rate—funny to think of it now—8 to 1, compared to today’s 42 to 1.
Our brains tend to romanticize memories, preserving only pleasant fragments while suppressing pain and shame.
Sometimes those distorted, overly idealized moments are the only thing I can hold on to amid the dull military routine and strict people in camouflage.
Nostalgia for the sweetness of carefree life has over time turned into something cloying—a numbness, even detachment.
And this detachment, I think, led us to the world we live in now: one teetering on the edge of a third world war, where Russian drones fly far beyond Ukraine’s borders; where genocide—in Ukraine and in Palestine—unfolds under the silent consent of democratic nations; where American militants roll out red carpet for a war criminal, Vladimir Putin, ceremoniously invited to the U.S.
Our carelessness gave too much freedom to authoritarian and terrorist states. They felt impunity, and now dream of conquering our free world.
I try to shake off these symptoms of Stockholm syndrome and return myself to reality, holding an assault rifle in one hand and the pen that writes this letter, four meters underground, in the other, as if it moves without me: only the aggressor is guilty of aggression.
This series is an ode to simple joys I once took for granted. A way to escape reality into a past world—a distorted, sugary realm of memories that wraps around you like cotton candy bought by your parents on a seaside promenade in now annexed Crimea; a world that will never return, where the memories of it melt in the sun, leaving a sticky trace on your fingertips and a sunburn on your shoulders.
The rain is about to start, washing it all away.
Vlad
