The City Painting

The fragile balance and fusion of what is self-controlled and passionate, what is thought and felt, ordered and chaotic, individual and shared, is a source of true art. This primordial unity of the Dionysian and Apollonian, so greatly described by young Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy, is also what I wish my art to comprise. This juxtaposition of what belongs to nature and what belongs to culture, what is real and unreal and out of control and controlled was also a subject to philosophical speculations of ancient Chinese thinkers who saw art as a game of these forces, in which artist ought to become ‘a tool in the hands of Dao’ – the unnameable principle of flow. A skilled artist was considered a craftsman of li – an ancient pattern of nature that can be found in everything around us. As a philosophy graduate, I aim to combine the meaningfulness and spontaneity, thought and intuition in order to create art at its best: full of hidden significance yet light and joyful. I see art as a completion, or even coronation, for philosophy, and painting itself as a scaffolding for thought – a construction to initiate and support ideas and concepts, and also, as a structure created to refresh the mind. The meaning, in this case, arrives spontaneously, revealing itself out of lines and shapes gradually. No initial plan, only the journey itself is important, journey through the means of mind, colour, and texture to the finalisation: ambiguous, subjective, multidimensional. The images presented are filled with semi-abstract objects, seemingly random compositions, and various styles. One of the styles, which I call ‘nanopainting’, is a usage of different media to ‘pack’ each centimetre of the image with meaning, to leave the impression that both the fragment and the work are just small parts of some bigger, perhaps limitless wholeness; like a cutaway, a piece of a great puzzle.