Its possibilities are as endless as they are contradictory. It is democratic. The color white is a non-hierarchical unity of all colors, and thus easily dominates all monochrome spaces. It is dynamic. Acquiring now a tender feminine, now a daring and dangerous overtone, it does not privilege any of the possible positions.
As a part of its creative process, it ceaselessly directs discrete dynamic transformations into a single current. Destroying, it undermines static forms while preserving their values in its admixture. The silent mystery of the color white means that it is ready to lay its mechanism bare as it develops. The color’s raging element promptly gives material shapes to subconscious impulses, destroying conscious intentions before they reach the visible range. Calm. Clarity. Mindfulness. Reticence. Solitude. Silence. Whiteness. Whiteness calms the elements. The color is sterile, and the attendant phenomena of black and leftover shades only underscore its shining purity. Its pervasive potential to change the nature of other colors refines the process of developing ideas; its surreal and phantasmagorical quality weaves dangerous webs of irony and illusions; once light, color, time and sound are dismantled to their constituent parts, reality allows to make surreal phenomena visible. The universality of whiteness allows to express one’s physical experience on canvas, to document spiritual and emotional metamorphoses. The color white contains an endless range of gradations. Its constant changes and affinity for self-sufficiency inform the order of works and the series’ goal: to empirically develop pure whiteness, and to transform whiteness from the means to the end goal. As implied by the title of the series, it culminates in the absolute “white in white,” that is, in the depiction of white movement within white atemporal space with white paint. The logic of this finale is supported by the qualitative experiment with pervasive whiteness that affirms the quality of the color as an archetype and a paradigm. (Volodymyr Budnikov. Kyiv, 1996)
WHITE IN WHITE
White in White poses the question of optics first and foremost: white, as we know, is light rather than color, signifying unity and culmination of the entire color spectrum. In general, the issue of “optics” has been a cornerstone of painting ever since the 19th century. It was a reaction to the historic shift in empirical exploration of the universe, rejecting the notion that reality was somehow exemplary or representative. This notion fascinated Delacroix, but did not become fully formulated until the Impressionists. Granted, the optic’s ascension from the gnoseological level (dealing with the work’s structure, perception and cognition) to the ontological occurred later, in the early 20th century, in the works of the Abstractionists. We should approach the issue of “white in white” from this position too. Over the course of the century, many artists (Malevich, The White Manifesto by Lucio Fontana, The White Flag and The White Numbers by Jasper Johns, white monochromes of the ZERO group, to name but a few) had treated the notion, each offering a unique interpretation of its progressively more central role as an archetype of contemporary culture. To this day, “white in white” is a matter not so much of art forms as of optics, understood not only as a unique “perspective” but also as a visual system and philosophy of art. This philosophy covers the relations between the end and the beginning, between the traditional and the contemporary, between reality and culture in constant flux. From this perspective, the achromatic tandem of black and white in all its gradations symbolizes the circular movement from culture to non-culture. For example, this is how Malevich elaborated it within the context of his Supremacism theory: “Like Kafka’s swimmer, a Supremacist comes from the ‘white unity’ of the objectless prehistoric world, crosses the movements zone of culture and returns to whiteness, his land.”
After his black square on white background, Malevich created The White Square on White Background (1918), stating that it might mean both the end of the cultural legacy of the past (with its duality of form and content, spirit and matter, subject and object, earthly and celestial), but it could simultaneously signal the beginning of a new culture and new art based on pure color and light, on “temporal” philosophical positions, seeking not representation but consciously created archetypes: to resort to philosophical terms, the Nothing that contains Everything. The present-day notion of yet another “end of the era” calls not only for apocalyptic visions in art but also for clear feelings adequate to emancipated, primeval, elemental perspective on reality. For example, in discussing the new optics, V.Miziano stated that “It is important to acknowledge that the present period’s specificity lies in the global reduction of optics […] Vision lingers in its initial, elementary stage of purity.” We should also mention another popular opinion, according to which the history of contemporary painting saw the replacement of figurative works with explorations of discrete elements, whereas simplified structure is in inverse proportion to polysemy and universality of signs that could serve as metaphors for semantic meanings.
In January 1995, Volodymyr Budnikov, known for his elaborate and vibrant work with colors, presented a large series The Mystery of Life, which explored the Baroque Weltanschauung through the lens of contemporary painting tropes (with a markedly broad palette and expressive brushwork). Therefore, when the collective show Black-and-White, not half a year later, featured two of his works, one in black, the other in white palette (with the same recognizable baroque expansive brushwork), it was initially interpreted as a demand of the show’s theme. For whatever reason, we did not yet think that it was an expression of a deeper yearning for monochrome minimalism. The artist himself stated that his interest in monochrome painting was somewhat ad hoc, arising from an unfinished (non finito) pair of works, from the “complicated simplicity” of interrelations of the warm and cool white and contrasting black.
Later Budnikov created a small painting, initially envisioned as fully white, but, as if scared by his “monochrome daring,” the artist drew a vibrant red line on the side as a symbol of his former style.
After several more canvases with variations on white, it became clear that a new period began in Volodymyr Budnikov’s oeuvre. The robust heightened colors of his “Baroque series” exhausted him and prompted him to eschew, at this stage at least, openly spectral painting. Obviously, this change had both external/“reactive” and internal/“consistent” reasons (Budnikov had several earlier drastic shifts in his “palette trajectory”). Budnikov had first started to explore color white in the early 1970s, as a reaction to his earlier “black series” (which, coincidentally, also engaged with the Baroque tradition, albeit with its “lower,” “folksy,” “decorative” strata). He would occasionally produce white, sensual, soft landscapes, “plaster still lives, white metaphysical figures…” Although steeped in empirical feelings, this idea gravitated towards static aesthetics (eventually undermining empiricism) and immoveable, purely metaphysical forms. At present it has been fully supplanted by the aesthetics of organic movement that equates the painter’s task with the original meaning of the term zoographia, “the description of the living” (from the Greek zoon), the art of the random and ever-changing. In the sense, color white is treated as pure and life-giving. Budnikov’s newer paintings no longer have the almost “painful” surface texture.
The structure of the paintings of the White in White series is also different: defined by serendipities and marked freedom, they still have internal structure.
Sometimes this structure is consciously dismantled, whereas at other times it follows the ostensibly unpredictable and chaotic brushwork and is transformed into a fairly rhythmic, sturdy sign, a hieroglyphic that denotes the unity of the “absolutely unconditional” whiteness with the metaphoric space, light streams and ideal meanings. This is probably indicative of the artist’s fascination with China. We should also point out two important elements that were new in Budnikov’s oeuvre.
The first is the appearance of what is defined as the “void” in the Eastern tradition (the term is applicable to many of Yves Klein’s series of the 1960s). “One has to master one’s inner life, that is, the void signified by spiritual plenitude,” wrote Paul Wember at that time. Budnikov’s current “void-oriented” perspective is close to this stance, believing as he does that “painting without painting” allows cognition of a higher reality. The second new element of the white painting style is the emergence of “object-oriented” motifs (despite his monumentalist schooling, Budnikov is an ardent proponent of easel painting). Ostensibly, he does not engage with his viewers the way one would in actions or installations, but the presence of color white lends his works unique spatial or even “installation-like” weightlessness, emancipating them from the walls of the exhibition. They become dynamic and open, and unfurl almost cinematographically in time and space, inviting viewers into a completely new process where they could become co-authors.
I would like to end on a minor symptomatic observation. Color is returning to some works of the “white in white” series, adding more nuances (and occasional counterpoints) to the cycle’s imagery and atmosphere. Is the artist tired of color white? It is easy to guess what awaits the viewers in the artist’s subsequent works. (Oleksandr Soloviov)