KaizerFish

Truth is an agreement
between the Existent
and the Maker.
Martin Heidegger

One of the Hellenic experience sufferers which was later on gifted by Destiny to peacefully die on a warm seacoast minted acquired wisdom as a saying: “Life is always a duration that forgets us in its immortality just at the moment of our termination”.

Not every artist is capable of non-stopping. Velocity of changes around our existence tempts our consciousness to turn back towards the overcome path. So the majority of those tempted were frozen turned a face to their past just Lott’s wife who couldn't help peeping back at the doomed Sodom. Wandering through exhibitions of Ukrainian modern art one will be sick and tired of wondering – how big is a number of those “ever-turned-backs”, imitators of self-beginnings.

Yaroslav Yanovskyj, the well-known Ivano-Frankivsk artist of the 90-s generation, quite successfully overcomes that “turn-back complex”. His works do not fix their lines and colours; like those of the waves of Time they resemble old buildings doomed to transfigure into ruins once you stop beholding them. They do not evoke conclusions. His art is the art of collapse, yet it leaks out no termination. These paintings strip up the desire to look them upon; they do not weary your mind with any concepts. It might well be the mark of conceptualism.

The subject of observing Yaroslav’s aggression is that standing between the Creator and the Creature. Things, lines and colours which can't be reached by your capability of wise tranquility remain reasonless stuff of Existence. That is why Yaroslav's paintings are anti-intellectual. They present the Lake of intuition with a small island of common signs in the middle of it. And respectable conceptual fishes are being seen in the depths of the twinkling mirror of this Lake − cause institution needs no translation.

Yanovsky's art is difficult for grasping. It possesses something savage burdened with inevitable craving in it. Nuances lack as odds and ends of this civilization lost in semi-needs of its inhabitants. Dark red and black dues of wishes both openly and stubbornly annihilate golden and green sparkles of the attempted area, embitter the depths of multi-coloured astral with an acid of definiteness pull it into the process of collapsing − into a sudden rushing down the slope of the canvas’s verticality.

So mortals seek in the past contiguity of Existence. So new-born kiddies die in mirrors of coloured cameos. Art of collapse. Yanovsky.

Yaroslav's paintings are inside the symbols found by him. He is too egoistical to give himself to the Signs of Existence. He never allows himself to cross their borders, to define and to resolve. He is “inside himself and for himself”. And we as the beholders of art's experience are so far away the terrains of his accomplishment that we can't but shout remembering Cogelett: “Vanity of Vanities!”

© Vladimir Yeshkilev, 1994.