Fears, 2025

Oleksandra Hrebelna  

The “11 PM" series of paintings is an artistic exploration of intimacy, vulnerability, and privacy through the lens of peering into a person's nightlife. The day is a space for society, a time of responsibility, social roles, and endless work. However, the night belongs solely to us.
What do we do when the city falls asleep and the masks come off? What are our thoughts before sleep, what do we dream of, and whose names do we mention in the darkness? While one person turns to God in silent prayer, another seeks answers to questions they dare not voice aloud. This is an honest observation of the multifaceted nature of the human night—from profound loneliness to absolute freedom from external judgment.
The work «Fears» explores the opposite, dark side of nocturnal privacy. Before falling asleep, when the outside noise fades away, we are overtaken by thoughts we manage to avoid during the day: insecurities, fears, and doubts. In the darkness of the room, they grow, take up too much space, and begin to distort our reality.
Nighttime fears come in various forms and depths. Some are existential, such as the fear of poverty. Others are painful and very real for each of us today, like the fear of falling asleep and not waking up because of a missile strike. However, no matter how different they may be, they share one thing in common: they all exist in our minds.
The painting captures a moment of an illusory yet exhausting struggle against something that does not physically exist at this very second. It is a classic battle against windmills. We try to strike the face of an invisible enemy who has no body but inflicts very real pain. The tragedy of this internal war is that a person is everything at once: the one who fears, the one who attacks, and the very source of that fear.
And yet this state is common to all. As Mike Tyson's trainer Cus D'Amato said: when two fighters step into the ring, both are scared. But the one who takes a step forward despite the fear is the one who wins.