The artist's rolled-up works on paper, known and made public during various artistic events, have also been transformed into spatial objects. The works, as if prepared for storage in the studio, acquire a new meaning and a completely different materiality as a result of this presentation.
In the exhibition project "Hidden", Volodymyr Budnikov questions the visible, obscuring what is usually visible in an artwork. Instead of properly presenting his works to the public, the artist hides or obscures their prominent side, questioning the dominance of the so-called face of the work. The drawings in the exhibition are exhibited rolled up in scrolls or unlit. The viewer can only imagine what the artist has hidden. But the arbitrariness of imagination is also questioned here. Something in a work of art remains hidden from view forever, even when we can see it clearly. And this invisible is not anything.
It is as if the painted has been taken away from Volodymyr Budnikov's drawings. However, the elimination of the visual component in "Hidden" upholds the fundamental condition of the work, namely, its integrity. In the absence of the visible, which is familiar to the viewer, the breakdown of the work into an idea and a result becomes impossible, since the certainty of both positions isolates the viewer in a certain way, does not allow him to join this work. Thus, when the viewer is confronted with Budnikov's works, he or she unwittingly abandons subjectivity, relying instead on the artist's explanations instead of their own vision and understanding.
Volodymyr Budnikov emphasises that the main thing in the Hidden project is light. Thus, with carefully considered simplicity, he clarifies the general nature of artistic expression. Appealing to the literal interpretation of the word project, the author dissolves the focus in a beam of light as a condition for revealing things through projection. However, it is not the projection that is the meaning-making element, but the light itself. The exhibition space hints at Plato's cave without the hypnotic effect of illusory shadows. The author invites the viewer to slide their minds past the established positions of light sources and images and notice the illuminated void that connects these two points on the map of the work. Budnikov focuses on the emptiness, which is, in fact, the main power of the work. It defines an important topography, where the essential area lies between "what the artist wanted to say" and what the viewer saw. In his poem "The Girl," Boleslav Les'myan extremely accurately traces the passionate desire for truth as a process of gradual subtraction, which ultimately leads to a complete pure emptiness: "And you are laughing at that emptiness - but it is not laughing at you, is it?"
The Hidden project uses objects from different series, which together reveal a single common theme. "Hiding Place for Light", made in 2010, is a kind of beginning, the point where the project is rooted. In this small sculpture, Budnikov compares a line (a three-dimensional "line" of wire) with light, or rather with the process of light coming out of a hidden stalk, a burrow, and emerging. The artist's rolled-up works on paper, known and made public during various artistic events, have also been transformed into spatial objects. The works, as if prepared for storage in the studio, acquire a new meaning and a completely different materiality as a result of this presentation.
The project's optics are also determined by the temporal vector of its overall structure. Each rolled-up drawing becomes a kind of historical artefact, a separate testimony to the author's overall artistic output. And the arrangement of the rolls in the showcases surrounds them with a specific aura of museum art, where attention usually shifts from the essence of the work to the fact of museumification.
We are looking at something like an exhibition in reverse, a kind of absurd reverse action. Hiding instead of displaying provokes an impulse to reconsider the perception of an artistic gesture, to recognize it as one's own in a certain sense. Moreover, white paper rolls are like fragments of ancient columns, from the archaeological remains of which one can reconstruct not only architectural forms but also join a certain way of thinking. Instead of creating a repository of documents, Budnikov proposes to mentally "unpack" the archive. The author advocates the indivisibility of the energy of an artwork, the key to which is not the usual addition of the right components. Rather, it is a dark hidden matter that can sometimes emit light. With his gesture, Volodymyr Budnikov emphasises the only possible clarity, which is opposed to the optional multiplicity of interpretations. The rigour of perception here is a kind of synonym for responsibility. The viewer cannot say "I see it this way", because the mystery in the work requires a completely different analysis. (Vlada Ralko)