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I make the point of using the word “painting” to underscore the robust presence of the genre as it discovers new modes of
existence. Painting is not merely an empty gesture subjugated to the “objective existence” of the exposition.
Coincidentally, this “painting” is not a conventional “artwork” or a “piece of art” that vests great importance in the presence of
a “frame,” the restrictive top-bottom-right-left coordinates, or in singling out “a slice of art” from the pictorial space. The format
of a long line, as well as the shape and size of figures, is inherently valuable in that it makes tangible a pervasive, strikingly real,
unstable and phantasmagoric part of the pictorial universe.
Conventionally, everything beyond the frame is seen as lacking importance; it may be discarded as unneeded, whereas an
artwork is an independent, internally dynamic art object. Meanwhile, the Act of Liberation focuses not on the planes of paintings
but on the endless pictorial space filling the room, omnipresent like air.
The phenomenon of “pictures without pictures” is further buttressed by the illusion of “painting without painting” (that is, by
excessive narrowing of the palette). This painterly austerity is fostered by the desire to make light, the sum total of all colours
and, as Hermann Goepfert had put it, “the vessel for a certain singular physical and spatial quality,” the focus of attention, and to
create something like a general formula of painting that would make the project’s idea more intelligible.
I should particularly note the importance of intervals and empty spaces in the exposition, which is why the project employed
the so-called still shot principle. The exposition can be envisaged as something akin to a film, or rather a stereo film (the optical
effect is attained not only by dismantling the pictorial plane but also by the very painterly technique: some details remain out of
focus whereas others are clear and well-defined). This leads us to the conclusion that the cameras shooting this “film” are still:
they document all movements in the pictorial space without pausing on or singling out anything in particular.
Since no element of the painterly movement was consciously singled out, and was only documented because it crossed the
camera’s line of view, empty spaces between the fragments of the “painting” acquire crucial importance as extensions of
the very movement “caught on tape,” which continues outside the frame, unseen to the eye. Therefore, all constituents of
the project intend to explore and, in a way, to reveal the Unified Space of Painting, unformed, existing nowhere, seeking and
failing to exist. (Volodymyr Budnikov)
*The project wasn’t realized