runaway phantasmagoric forms and geometric shapes; centrifugal and centripetal compositions; free brushstrokes, unrestrained both in color and in texture, and unique sense of order and structure that not only doesn’t prevent the illusion of painterly kinetics but also underscores its key characteristics (joy and darkness, changing scope, and more).
«The artist’s recognizable inspired, dramatic, multifaceted and poignant style evokes the feeling of abandon, pleasure and spiritual passion. Among its other features, The Secret of Life conveys the postmodern approach to different styles, strata, movements and figures in art (intuitive and subconscious rather than rational and cultivated). The artist weaves a contemporary baroque lacework from a much broader range of national and global traditions, exhibiting more creative tact and increased sophistication. For this reason, memories about Warhol (one painting is entitled In Memoriam of Warhol) are as authentic within the emotional horizon of the series as memories about icons, expressive abstract works, Ukrainian baroque churches, constructivism of the 1920s or East Asian calligraphy. To push the analogy further, we are dealing with the established “high” Baroque. For artists of the Baroque, the world was a space of lost harmony, of antinomies and paradoxes treated as an existential norm, and, at the same time, the space of the aesthetic principles of “the other harmony” realized through the poetics of contrasts.
In his Secrets of Life, Budnikov voices a deeply personal reflection on the baroque’s affinity for contrasts. He succeeds in offering a balanced panorama of, so to say, formal contrasts too: light and shadows, almost strikingly decorative works and profound painterly usage of tonal play; space and planes; easel painting par excellence and hieroglyphic usage of signs; runaway phantasmagoric forms and geometric shapes; centrifugal and centripetal compositions; free brushstrokes, unrestrained both in color and in texture, and unique sense of order and structure that not only doesn’t prevent the illusion of painterly kinetics but also underscores its key characteristics (joy and darkness, changing scope, and more). This helps to bring together semantic counterpoints too, such as myths and eternity, the high spiritual and the Epicurean sensuous, coloristic richness of meanings and their almost total absence, pauses inside a dynamically unfolding dramatic series.»
Oleksandr Soloviov
(A fragment from the text for the catalogue of Volodymyr Budnikov’s exhibition. Kyiv, 1995)