Young artists Ivan Bazak and Volodymyr Kuznetsov explore completely different realities and worlds of perception at this modernist gallery.
ung Ukrainian artists. The winners are as different as could be. Ivan Bazak’s work is serene and melancholy, while Volodymyr Kuznetsov’s is neurotic enough to creep you out.
Take Me Home…
Painter Ivan Bazak was born in the pretty western city of Kolomiya, and since 2001 has lived in Dusseldorf and Berlin. But in a way, he’s never left his hometown. “My theme is my home,” he says.
More specifically, his exhibition “Kolomiya” is about what home means to us and our perspectives on it from afar, and about how the place we come from affects our lives.
Bazak’s monochromatic landscapes at first do little to inspire or draw in viewers. They can strike you right off as drab little things. But then the more you look at them, the more they signify and make sense. Bazak plays with the idea of perspective – of nostalgia and how we think about the homes we’ve left behind – by setting up human clay figurines to gaze at the dreary little landscapes he creates. It’s as if you’re looking at Bazak looking – or at yourself looking, stepping back from your own consciousness to see what it contains. The point is that our perspectives – our memories and imaginations – are important in creating our realities, and once you realize that, these unassuming little canvasses become poetic.
Fear of the Dark
Raw fear is at the center of Volodymyr Kuznetsov’s exhibit, which is appropriately entitled “Scary.”
More specifically, the exhibit is about confronting and challenging our own fears, and in paintings like “Suicide” and “Infection,” he forces us to look at disturbing images. Kuznetsov likes to work in a self-consciously primitive or childish way: Some of his creepy figures look like they were drawn either by a kid or a member of some naive ancient tribe. “Infection,” for example, is an artfully messy scrawl of neurotic fuzz that somehow seems to capture what it feels like to be afraid of filth and contamination.
“Society is faced with innumerable fears,” says Kuznetsov, “from the fear of death to the fear of cockroaches and rats.”
But fear, to Kuznetsov, isn’t crippling; it’s rather an energy that forces people to act and, in the end, to develop, at least if they have the guts to look at what they’re afraid of and conquer it. On the other hand, human warmth and love are also themes in his painting and videos. He keeps everything in play, shuffling the viewer between love and hate, terror and security, pain and pleasure.
Such antinomies, he says, are characteristic of contemporary culture, and he’s helping viewers deal critically with them. His work might not be the sort of stuff you want hanging on your walls, unless you want to scare your children, but it’s still compelling.
“Kolomiya” by Ivan Bazak
“Scary” by Volodymyr Kuznetsov
Center for Contemporary Art
2 Skovorody, 238-2446.
(Both exhibits run until Oct. 17.)
For more information, please contact Olesya Ostrovska-Lyuta by phone at 238-2446, or by e-mail: [email protected].
