The line between painting and drawing is rendered permeable, he explores the media specificity of both, mixing their respective artistic means, expressive lines and the wash of color, strokes and brushwork texture,” aptly noted the curator and art scholar Viktoria Burlaka.
The contemplative melancholic nature of these paintings is also relevant: on the one hand, they are more interesting to contemplate than to look at, because ostensibly they “don’t depict anything in particular.” On the other hand, they keep the viewer’s eye peeled in a kind of meditation, as if drawing viewers deeper. This bridges the two extremes.
“At that point I used to spend a lot of time at scrap metal plants, among metal sheets, cylinders, wires and rods arranged by shape and size. These shape-based arrangements had something of the austerity of the musical pitch. In each discrete category of shapes, among apparently identical elements, be it cylinders, sheets or wires, the theme would begin to strain and grow more complex with the layering of potentialities: every beginning announced a different subsequent trajectory of development. Identical shapes did not herald unified meanings. These plain shapes apparently offered a score of repetitions with minimal variations. Each form repeated another one, almost identical to it, but with a barely perceptible shift,” said Volodymyr Budnikov. The multitude of almost identical elements had been evocative of “Stockhausen’s musical vision, his notion of ‘static’ time where each composition points out the unity of several temporal planes in which time flows at varying speeds,” explained the artist. As the result, the works presented at the exhibition have rhythm, broken lines, random abstract blotches and geometric shapes.
(From the press release for the exhibition Measures of Time at Voloshyn Gallery)