text about my art "There are Two Circles"
There are two
circles containing artistic disciplines: one where poetry,prose,painting,graphic
art,dramaturgy , opera and dance performances with clear meaning beyond dance
and tone-poems [meaning music intertwined with texts] belong.They are arts of
communication.
The second circle
contains decorative visual art of ornamentation, abstract art,dance,symphonic
music and architecture. I make every effort to belong to the long ,10 000 years
long march of artists who understood that art is very intently aiming to
communicate.Not just to display this or that, but to communicate. Railway
time-tables communicate and their virtue is strict reliability. In my
understanding of art reliability is not important, indeed ambiguity abounds.
Poetical point of view depends on layered and rich ambiguities.
When I was twenty years old I was enthusiastically
“experimenting” ,meaning sloppily gluing and cutting some haphazard imagery
,Then,I went to museum and saw Northern proto-renaissance paintings and suddenly
everything changed for me. I was confronted with
extreme responsibility for forms,for the quality of contours, for
matchless craftsmanship and sublime content- after that revelatory encounter
with Great Art I could not look at my work, at works of my professors but with
contempt we give to a fraud. Ever since that encounter I take sustenance,
guidance and a reminder of what is called Art installed forever in matchless
works of those Masters: Campin,van Eyck, Memling,van der Weyden,van der Goes or
the Master of St. Bartholomew Altar. They created in their paintings
presentations of values toward which we could aspire and know that such heights,
such elevated states of the spirit do
exist.
The most important lesson I gathered from the Quattrocento
Masters is the understanding that a painting is an open window to a certain
richly descriptive world of its own. Not a pleasing connection of forms and
colors, but magically convincing illusion of some intriguing view. In it a
painter can, and should invent or render a depiction of life or a vision
demanding to be portrayed.
There is two ways to grow the subject of a painting.One
calls for rational clarity , much like a project for a poster with a message
where all elements contribute to its consise presentation. The second is its
radical opposite: the elements in view are ambiguos and do not form a cohesive
one message.It seems to me more like a map for various discoveries about the
place depicted.More like our own lives,where one overriding message is not in
evidence, while ambiguities form a marshland of reeds in all directions.
We experience
the world as an assembly of separate objects and paintings reflect that
granularity.Every artist has his unique description of those objects.My
intension is as often as I can to express some imaginary life of those
objects.The longer I work on a painting the more alive all of those objects
become to me.Seeing some view and painting it as so many colors, tonalities
would seem insufficient reason for as elaborate undertaking as painting.I want
to imagine more surprizing, more intense and emotionally engaging view in the
window of a painting.I want to reach realistic rendering and overcome
it.Painting a color photo would seem to me a grave mistake.To dress in
realistic, ilusionistic garb the objects in a painting in order to show some
compeling poetical reaction to the world – that would be the definition of my
intentions.