Returning to the Crimean landscape becomes the key for me, it sets the clock. Gurzuf is perfect for landscapes. He is as familiar as he is versatile with his southern geometry, and each time he turns into a white spot that needs to be explored. Each approach to Gurzuf's image invariably turns into a distancing with the stunning optical deception of a telephoto lens, where space grows instead of shrinking, swells madly, destroys its own framework, crosses out the visible, becomes a sign.

Landscape. My landscapes do not double, but deny reality, hide it, enveloping it with something like air. The air that surrounds real objects. I am attracted to this invisible layer that does not allow me to approach the objects closely. This invisible layer saves me from a catastrophic collision with literality, like a protective airbag.

The space of a canvas. The landscape pushes for special optics that provoke you to "enter" it. But I avoid final certainty, in my landscapes there is seldom a center or a main object to grab hold of. My "viewfinder" moves freely through the scene, past objects that are only illusory in their clusters. I see how the landscape seeps through them, like air, the touch of which you can feel with your skin but not hold in your hands. (Volodymyr Budnikov. Kyiv, 2008)