The Endless Landscape
The Soviart Gallery, a major venue of the capital’s art exhibits on Andriyivsky uzviz, features a project by Volodymyr Budnykov, a noted representative of contemporary nonfigurative art.
The author says he is returning to white as “his color” and this could be used an epigraph for the new exposition. Remaining true to white, the artist seems to deliberately avoid mentioning the physical nature of this color (it is known to consist of all the seven colors of the spectrum). And thus tonal shades penetrate the molecular structure of this color with such naive ingenuousness, stressing even more the dictatorship of white.
Volodymyr Budnykov’s established professionalism allows him to discard the spatially limited compositions characteristic of both easel and monumental paintings. Consciously uniting with the eternal character of birth and growth in the Universe, the artist seems to become part of the overall pulsing rhythm of self-creation as the fundamental principle of existence.
Naturally, such a global perception of artistic space is incompatible with any real surface that might offer itself to the artist for the implementation of his idea. Being unable to fixate that pictorial layer on the basis of the aerial environment, the artist has to justify himself before the viewer by using the notion of landscape.
In a sense, landscape, the way we understand it, is also endless. Suffice it to remind oneself of all those quickly changing but endless landscapes one watches from a train or a car. It is to their very horizontal extension that Volodymyr Budnykov most likely owes some of his compositions.
Freeing the surface of the canvas of the material load of the pictorial art, the artist allows the basis to live a life of it own, free from that thick layer of impermeability. A light touch of the brush, like a fleeting poetic thought or fine lace of a musical score, or the undying lines of an hieroglyph. Although any associations with the Orient are possible only at the level of perception of that refined mastery with which the artist’s brush touches the canvas. Strictly adhering to the Western artistic tradition, Volodymyr Budnykov rejects all Oriental reminiscences. Even the rice paper he favors in his graphic works does not mean using the tradition but a quest for new expressive means. Appreciating the lightness of this paper, the artist refers it to his own system of landscape Weltanschauung.
Avoiding the narrative spirit, Budnykov breaches even the traditional exhibit techniques. Interrupting horizontal and vertical movements on the canvas, he composes certain blocks, thus preventing the viewer from getting lost in some banal perception of the exposition. In fact, the very landscape idea becomes even more obvious in such placement of the canvases. The viewer seems to open one window after another, looking out on the refined white world of Budnykov’s landscape surrounding us and showing a new visage in every window.
Without arguing the author’s landscape stand, we begin to guess that what we see is a landscape of the True Fatherland, whose expanses every true master subconsciously tries to embrace.
