Talk about the Unspeakable

Oleksandr Dubovyk creates paintings, writes philosophical and ironic texts, reads “his” literature, visits interesting exhibitions in different countries, and continues to look for the golden mean between his own desire for an ideal world and the harsh laws of the everyday world. Sometimes it seems that the artist is carrying precious light from distant pulsar and the echo of this light is reflected in every day of his life following the slogan “Here and now!”

The exhibition features paintings made by the artist in the past decades, however, the roots of this art come from the creative search in the early 1960s. The search for self-identity made the artist completely abandon official trend of the Soviet times – the so-called socialist realism in favor of author painting free of any ideological features. For this brave decision the artist had to pay a certain price: for many decades his work wasn’t officially recognized and his financial conditions were extremely poor. However, he received real pleasure from the free art work and eventually he came to the long-awaited triumph – international recognition.

Today, Dubovyk is a well-known artist, but his work again is not limited to conventions of modern art-commerce. It is his individual microcosm. The artist proved his right to exist at the cost of great effort that is why the Triumphers from the paintings by Dubovyk know well the price of any victory. These metaphorical creatures with tiny bright flags clearly embody lifetime experience of an artistic person, who “has many biographies.” It is known that we live in the world of duality. Light only exists due to the existence of shadows, happiness is a bright top of misfortune, and the law is a brave rider on the back of the eternal chaos.

Contemplating about the metamorphoses of life, the artist in his paintings does not just reflect, but he is sincerely trying to decipher our strange, absurd, and cruel life and consciously direct rays from his own outer pulsar – source of light, intelligence, and harmony – on it. His paintings are very close in spirit to the iconic works of the Byzantine Empire, the European Middle Ages, and early Renaissance. It is quite natural because the external features – canonic, genre, and style have changed, but the origins of art remained absolutely identical. Thanks to the metaphorical content, spectral purity of palette, and local application of colored spots Dubovyk manages to achieve the focus on the spiritual meaning of the painting, because real art is, in the grand scheme of things, is a talk about the unspeakable. It is no coincidence that Oleksandr Bohomazov noted that “the only purpose of art is to turn a man of Earth into the Son of Heaven.” Thus, a painting is the most sincere and outspoken of all possible versions of dialogue.