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THREE STORIES FROM UKRAINE Organizer: Gallery Collection (Kiev, Ukraine). CHA, hall 16 (2nd floor)
Exposition «Three Stories» presents the works of three Ukrainian artists: Alexander Gnilitskiy, Maxim Mamsikov and Alexander Roitbourd. It is not a retrospective, but the result of a three year creative activity. All these artists prefer painting, but each one of them has his own story, inspired either by life itself, or existential experience or imaginary museum. Each one has his own perception of reality, being it allegedly «natural extract», or metaphysical conventionality and viscous textured deep chromaticity, or super verisimilar realism, which, in fact, is nothing more than… an unreal phantom.
Alexander Glinitzkiy is one of the pioneers of the «Southern wave» that manifested itself in the late 80s.
On his way to the «perfect age», in addition to his principal idea – painting, he turns to various types, genres, and techniques that abound in the modern visual practice: he makes video, creates installations, including the interactive ones, as well as «work in progress» and «growing art», kinetic sculpture, anamorphous, zoo tropes, text marginalia, he makes up opuses in the spirit of the radical design and shows VJ performances…
Gnylytskyi is the most unpredictable artist in the Ukrainian art-process where the very spontaneous, irrational way of existence provokes uncertainty of characteristics. Hence his strategy – eluding and constant mimicry multiplied by absurdism and neo-Dadaism. Even back in the trans-avant-guarde period his painting underwent several modifications: «curly style», green «wave painting», black and white grisaille, «children’s discourse»…
Gnylytskyi was one of the first to encroach on the painting centrism of the Ukrainian artistic conscience, by producing in video, in the early 90s, his own poem-action «Sleeping Beauty in the Glass Coffin», where Morpheus, Eros and Thanatos merged in the sacrament of the new idiotic decadence and then by making a video «Crooked Mirrors-Living Images» where a simple («chamber of laughter») system of the distorting optics results in the powerful hallucination …
In the 2000s the artist, on the one hand, gives preference to the pseudo-narrative painting, recoding mythologems and semantics of the characters of the cult cartoons, TV series, fairy-tales and legends (Cheburashka and Crocodile Gena, Schtirlitz and Mueller, Phantomas, Dracula, Mermaid…), on the other hand, he iconizes small household objects – glasses, toilets, openers, tennis balls, records – magnifying them to the absurd, non-functional sizes and transforming them using a magic pseudo-realistic technique into the strange, mysterious and incomprehensible «things in themselves».
Being an artist, Maxim Mamsikov is mostly interested in the ordinary life. However, the genre nature in his interpretation does not really mean the simple truth. His painting rather fits the recent fad – sort of a «post media realism», that is based on the mechanism of paradoxical psychological compensation – the further away from reality, the more persistently you hang on its look-alikes…
His pictures very often remind the audience of a set of random snapshots with «blurred» focus, as from a trembling camera, similar to the effect used by the directors of the Scandinavian Dogma. Sometimes the scenes look like a panorama «shooting» from the bird’s-eye view, sometimes from the window of a passing by car…
The plots of the small or even miniature works by Mamsikov (one of his series was even called «Pocket Painting») are unsophisticated, fragmentary and devoid of didactics: the football players on the field, lovers on the lawn, water sprinkler, a pack of «Belomor» cigarettes, the Gorbachev’s bald patch, a tank on the snow, a plate of borsch, a plane taking off, a skier, Gagarin, birch trees… The language of those works is an intriguing game on the verge of reality and light, unobtrusive dreams… In his series «Roads» and «Billboards» the artist succeeded to combine minimalism or nuances of a «natural» painting manner with the commercial and pop-art elements…
In the new author’s cycles «Heaven» and «Curtains» you can notice the expanded size and enhanced metaphysical state, and in the «Taschist» project «Color-test» which is equally abstract and hyperrealistic, the trends are towards experiments with pure essence of painting.
The paintings by Olexander Roitburd are practically always mythological and archetypical.
Several of his works - dated the second half of the 80s that used timeless mythologems - let us feel very sharp social notes that were communicated through allegoric, but capacious, precise and expressive «Aesopian language». His canvases very often leaned against a parable with its compressed sense, conventional set and soft ironic moralizing. His biblical theme paintings full of internal drama were also the artist’s favorite …
The paintings of that bright and prolific period (between the 80s and 90s - most fully and conspicuously manifested in the first and second exhibitions «After Post-modernism» in Odessa) were characterized by an excessive generosity, vitality, baroque. But, as was very sharply noted by S.Kuskov, art critic, here «through an abundance and fullness of the manifest form…, in the very culmination of condensation, pressure, compaction of the image texture…, the language of painting – expanding and bombastic - gradually shows its baseless (transcendental) origin…»
The project dated 1992 «Lady in White» - inspired by Titian – also abounded in phantasmagorical grandeur of plastic forms. But the surrealistic dominant that was born in it, happily kept them in the limits of the holistic, but ramified clone …
In the 90s paying attention to the different facets of his extremely energetic and creative character – in video, graphics, installations or Kulturtrager – Roitburd never betrayed his calling and gift of a painter. His new paintings sometimes make believe that he departs from his enthusiasm about mythology, abundance of quotations and metaphysical sayings… And sometimes, just the opposite – he would defiantly «slip back to his old ways»… His color scheme might be brighter or more ascetic, but his painting manner and his signature daub remain unfailingly recognizable.
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