Tired of reality?

In the world art of the 20th and 21st centuries the topic of dreams as the most enchanting and mystical travel into the sphere of human subconscious has become really ultra popular. All “intellectually progressive” readers have seriously delved into the studies of Freudist psychoanalysts. The masters of surrealism have created wonderful films, books, verse, and paintings, designer items, and refined jewelry, inspired by the  fantastic images from the dreams. And the audiences could not stop and “were asking for more,” feasting    their eyes on the bright phantasmagoria of talented dreamers.

The exposition in the AVS-Art Gallery “Dreams. Selected Works” presents for the audience not just pictures, but “unforgettably wonderful painting panels,” which, according to art director Alla Marychevska, will inevitably leave an imprint in the memory of audiences who are indifferent to art. Ukrainian artist Andrii Hurenko invites us to the world of his night revelations: each canvas is a synthesis of author’s delving into the world of subconscious and high technical masterfulness.

“The choice of plots, motives of pictures, and their interpretation remain mysterious to me,” Hurenko admits, “This is like a dream. When you are inside of it, everything is clear. But when you wake up, you have the feeling of a fairytale-like otherness, but it is already impossible to explain it with the help of daytime logic. Similar things happen also during the process of painting, when the image gradually emerges from the white light of the canvas, demanding to appear in this very shape. It is luck when my desire and its aspiration coincide. The ornament in my canvases looks like a rhythmic splashing of the sea waves or waving of leaves. It creates such a pulsation of forms which makes me plunge into the state of direct emotional experience. I very much want the contemplation to continue, bypassing the pragmatic trap of verbal definition, if I have an opportunity to do so.”

The primary impression produced by Hurenko’s pictures is the hyper ornamentation and bright decorativeness, chosen by the artist as a special language to convey the entire conceptual polyphony of the nature of a dream. But like it is impossible to show the taste and color, it is impossible to depict all the subtleties and nuances of emotional experiences of a person in his dream, when the personal space gives way to absolutely strange and accidental daytime impressions, mixes with subconscious images, and takes a new life as an absolutely new phenomenon.

UNTITLED, 2010

Of course, Hurenko, like any artist, finishes in his mind this hardly noticeable fragment of a dream, which is anchored in his daytime memory as a conditional and unsteady symbol, reconsidering it via the cultural archetypes, mythology, paganism, Eros, and imagination. In the picture Promenade the audience sees the noisy procession of centaurs with a cornucopia, surrounded by naked women, wonderful nymphs and muses, and the landscape in front of them sings the hymn of joy with the bold accords of impressionistically bright and rich colors. Here time and space become a whole thing: the dream lives according to different laws, everything is limitlessly and smoothly flowing in depth and in width, and there is no definiteness or finality.

Catcher of Flowers is a hunter who performs a mysterious dance, which is almost unnoticeable under the pale moonshine, and the entire dream in the canvas is filled with exuberant flourishing of fantastic plants. “I don’t see these images in my dreams. When I start working, the canvas becomes a sort of a mirror of the dreams,” Hurenko comments. “This is where I see what I later realize with the help of color, shape, and facture. Dreams are a very rare and astonishing reality, which enables us to reconcile the everyday reality and creative work. I live a different life owing to my pictures.”

The artist seeks to tell us that the time spent for exploration of the world of dreams won’t be useless. The exhibit “Dreams. Selected Works” will help the audience to take a rest from the dictate of realism and get inspiration from the amazing topic of night travels of our mind.

The exhibit will be open till October 18. The admission is free.