Installation (works on paper 2012-2014, metal objects, light)

The Hidden project uses objects from different series, which together reveal a single common theme. "Hiding Place for Light", made in 2010, is a kind of beginning, the point where the project is rooted. In this small sculpture, Budnikov compares a line (a three-dimensional "line" of wire) with light, or rather with the process of light coming out of a hidden stalk, a burrow, and emerging.

Installation in six parts, iron, light

Budnikov constructs his own provisional wings as a living form dependent on nothing but the arbitrary movement of the artist’s hand (the heavy iron Wings from the Heat project of 2010 come to mind). Much like in the Brechtian comparison of a trembling human hand to the trembling hand of a compass, Budnikov tracks the direction of thought with a high degree of precision, and uncovers it in each case at an unexpected and unpredictable phase. (Vlada Ralko, The Optics of Flight, 2018)

Collage Album, 2020
30 x 42, magazine fragments, acrylic, marker on paper

Paintings, works on paper*

The fundamental mistake of the new criticism lies in striking a deal with the totalitarian principle of subdividing an artwork into form and content. Art is usually judged from the perspective of its contents or formal components, although it is obvious that the wrong form may negate all good intentions, leaving behind a mere semblance of meaning. It follows that a meaningful plot cannot be judged as a separate merit that justifies the artist’s utterance.

Paintings, works on paper, painting on the wall*

Budnikov began his work on Flight with almost non-narrative drawings that offered glimpses of chaotic natural forms which gradually fell into order, arranging themselves from drawing to drawing into structural elements similar to Tatlin’s blueprints for wings. The artist began, it seems, by procuring airworthy forms for the natural chaos. And yet, the moment the images in given works transformed into a semblance of objects and risked becoming recognizable, the project changed direction, backpedaled and plunged back into abstraction. (Vlada Ralko, The Optics of Flight)

QUESTIONING THE VISIBLE. Series of paintings

Returning to a familiar space, your eyesight becomes sharper, so sharp it can pierce what you see.

The shapes of familiar landscapes are almost unchanged, frozen, as if petrified. Knowledge is overloaded with ostensibilities, but an eye seeks shelter among the ostensible, among its minutest details. The eye seeks out obscure signs of imperceptible changes that substitute events in this quiet existence: something is afoot down there, inside these familiar frozen landscapes.

Realism?

Series of paintings

When what was observed in reality transits to the area of abstract, when this so necessary for me translation occurs, abstractness somehow receives and holds, so to speak, parameters of picture seen. Even the purest convention in abstract work has for me a real thing as a basis. But every possible similarity of forms gains in abstract special content, when similar starts to relate not only to its primary equivalent, but also unfolds the specter of vectors, appealing to possible similarities anywhere.

Series of paintings inspired by Stockhausen’s musical vision

100x160, 160x100, acrylic on canvas 

The works of the Measure of Time exhibition offer an organic combination of color planes and precise brushwork that seems to have been inspired by Japanese calligraphy. They feature pronounced borders, the rhythm and contrast of simple shapes, and monumentality. All works are united by Budnikov’s characteristic restrained palette. “Budnikov is ascetic in his color sensibility. He adds a color accent or two to the sophisticated black-and-white weave of the whole.

Contact line* (with Vlada Ralko). Paintings, works on paper

LINE OF CONTACT (BETWEEN THE SELF AND THE SELFSAME)

For the last three years, our attention has been riveted to the so-called “line of contact.” In the early days of the hostilities in the East, the line was ostensibly justified by the logic of separating “what is ours” from “what is alien”. It has since spread, turning from a line into a surface.

Paintings, drawings

Chronologically speaking, a long procession of drawings is concluded with the Folds series, created during the Line of Contact project in Kaniv. Budnikov seems to reintroduce” abstract elements to a defined form as folds treacherously flex into recognizable shapes. Rumpled material, however, becomes a strikingly pertinent metaphor for the dangerous shifting world that affords no safe shelter. The roiling and shifting texture of baroque folds retains the abstract air of earlier drawings in its refusal to imitate recognizable forms.