Time is rolled up into a scroll. In fast-motion, the somnolent picture of this existence might have acquired dramatic or even catastrophic overtones, but our eyes are not sensitive enough to perceive what is really happening beyond familiar views. All changes are sucked into the landscape’s constancy, and each movement, made mysterious by its imperceptibility, seems to lose direction; the landscape’s existence appears to unravel into complicated trajectories that undermine one another and keep the general picture in place.
Constancies are supposed to be soothing, but identical layers increase tension within the unchanging picture. Instead of soothing, each repetition increases anxiety. Constancies repeat themselves, monotony turned into a dangerous virus that attacks time and consumes its present part. Ambivalent reality seems lethargic. This is evocative of Dovzhenko’s stills, when the character’s face freezes, and the movie, unnoticeably at first, grinds to a halt; this is uncanny because you fail to notice the moment when movement stops.
To make sure that the ostensible constancy of the visible does not lead me astray, I block out parts of the general picture and, one could say, try to peer into cracks between them, directing my gaze towards the correlations of directions that, in point of fact, actually generate the image. By removing the key objects from my line of sight, I seem to switch on the vision that was previously lulled by familiarity. I don’t care about changing lighting or perspective: their illusory diversity only underscores the unity of the visible in time. In being identical to itself, the visible undermines its own reality and becomes a fata morgana, something like a mirage that conceals authentic phenomena. The absence of actions (potted actions) conceals the action that makes me seek out the same space over and over again. The familiar space seems excised from the general flow of time. It seems untouched by changes.
The tense wartime reality pregnant with murky premonitions seems to lull our familiar peaceful spaces into deeper slumber, pushing them towards the margins of reality. On the other hand, overlaps of identical images of the visible do not presuppose constancy; moreover, constant repetitions make familiar spaces phantasmagoric, surreal. Fraught with ambiguity, the visible lingers in wait mode or energy conservation mode.
I often choose familiar objects or images that seem to have halted for my observations or experiments. It could be a landscape, a picture from the newsreel (these had recently started to repeat themselves, because “all is quiet on the front”), reproductions of classical paintings, anything that appears unchanged. The point is that I remove the image I saw and discard it as I work. I paint over or remove most of the narrative to solve the mystery of the visible. Sometimes I combine classical paintings with familiar real landscapes: it might look as if I were juxtaposing them or mixing everything up. To sum up, I take a familiar object and remove its recognizable features. I start by gradually removing its familiar components one by one, and eventually paint it over with something else entirely. In a way, the eye is fine-tuned to remove or “switch off” the image in order to come to the main solution. I translate the visible image into the language of abstraction, reframe it and solve it like a theorem. The familiar is a precondition, an oft-repeated “what if.” I receive and voice different solutions over and over again. Sometimes I grow indifferent to the conundrums and just watch the currents or trajectories of actions, narration, composition, and waves.
Maybe I just follow the idea as it puts down roots into a plot.
Maybe the initial idea of the visible gradually devours it, covers it with hungry offshoots, conceals it.
Be that as it may, I start by applying the known rules before unmasking them, step by step, revealing contradictions inside the cogent, voicing my suspicions and doubts, or striking them out altogether. By removing the concrete, I seem to test its essence by making the hidden manifest. Uncovering evidence of flaws of the final plan means that each of us has to reveal his or her origins, his or her source. (Volodymyr Budnikov, June – July 2017, Kyiv – the village of Chudyn)
BEYOND OBJECTS
«And first of all I shall recall to my memory those matters which I hitherto held to be true, as having perceived them through the senses, and the foundations on which my belief has rested; in the next place I shall examine the reasons which have since obliged me to place them in doubt; in the last place I shall consider which of them I must now believe.»
(René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy; translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane)
«…the limbic system regulates normal functioning of the “wakefulness – sleep” cycle. Memory suffers most from disorders [...] Although the limbic system is not an archive, the processes of recall of knowledge and skills stop functioning correctly. Memories remain, but become disjointed.»
(from a description of the limbic system of the human brain)
«I know the landscapes outside Kaniv, around Chernecha Hill, by heart. The waterfront, some trees, the forest, the highway, the houses, the copses, the cracks in lived-in and abandoned buildings... The Kaniv skyline remains unchanged, the lines look like a frozen still, everything is covered in time like mold. Everything is horizontal, the landscape laid flat, very few things conceal the sky.» (Volodymyr Budnikov)
In landscapes, I always found it very important to see the horizon, or at least its fragment; I always thought that landscapes with horizon covered by houses or trees were somewhat deficient, incomplete.
This time, exploring the landscape and not content with the visible, I looked up until I crossed the line of horizon: the landscape eventually exhausts itself in the sky. The landscape was sucked into the crack of the horizon. Time slipped out like sand. Each visible detail of the landscape was cast into doubt yet again. Everything around me looked like a counterfeit of itself, faux familiarity seemed horribly boring. There was no authenticity in “hard” earthly shapes or “soft” celestial forms.
Something important was happening on the borderline of the horizon, between heaven and earth, in the “nowhere” constantly pursued by everything that resists definition. Some things from there occasionally cast projections onto the screen of the visible: the Limbo emanates its icy ineffability. The Limbo zone remains beyond definitions and is usually described as doomed to repetitions without end. This line of ambiguity, however, prevents reality from slipping into the whirlpool of dizzying repetitions. It generates a constant stream of the Undefined that drives a wedge between defined spaces and safeguards against short circuits. Abstraction pries reality open and subtly redirects it. Reality gets a chance to take another look at itself from a different perspective instead of being reincarnated in its earlier version. Like Descartes had put it, “there were objects outside of me from which these ideas proceeded, and to which they were entirely similar.” (Volodymyr Budnikov, September 2017, Kyiv)