New «Time», №5 Painting

Ukrainian artist, master of modern landscape. I was born on October 1, 1988 in Pyriatyn (Poltava region), and grew up in a family of artists. I graduated from the Faculty of Fine and Decorative Arts of Poltava National Technical University, Yury Kondratyuk. Since 2013 I have been a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. I believe that to this day there is a misconception that landscape is the easiest genre to understand, because the beauty of nature is equally appreciated by people of any social status or intellectual potential. But a real landscape is not just a drawing reproduced with topographic accuracy, but a story with an open ending, which speaks to the viewer through the expression of symbols. My change of artistic vision has always been accompanied by a change of techniques. My early works are especially characterized by dense layers of paint and embossed strokes, which even academic exercises were able to turn into expressive sketches. Then I moved gradually from the real to the abstract, in order to transcend the limits of forms. Art critic Kenneth Clark wrote that the ideal landscape is always inextricably linked with the symbolic. That is, these genres were inspired by the dream of earthly Eden, striving to attain the maximum harmony between man. However, in the absence of any narrative to construct the plot, I relied only on the means of artistic expression. Decades of semantic and formal research have led me to the emergence of new motifs in painting, as well as to a change in the relationship between figures and landscape and the construction of another dimension, where color now reigns. In my landscapes, I deliberately emphasize excessive, almost naive, simplification, discarding details and thus clearing the space of everything secondary, leaving the dominant geometric elements and color spots. During my studies, I remember a task in which, on the example of decorative Roman plates depicting scenes from the life of the gods, it was necessary to simplify the plot to several lines that interact with each other. At first it seemed impossible, but when you give up all the details that the eye clings to, you begin to see simple lines that convey the compositional dynamics. It turns out that all the others are simply unnecessary. Suprematic elements, as if embedded in the canvas, serve for a rather paradoxical experiment: to break the composition, while maintaining a sense of harmony.