The Cultural Heritage Museum recently launched an art exhibit by Meritorious Artist of Ukraine Oleksandr Mylovzorov under the eloquent title Bacchanalia. It is a month-long and displays more than thirty works varying in technique and material, but invariably merging into the author’s favorite abstract style. In fact, Mylovzorov is known not only as a painter. He has spent over twenty years at the Art Fund’s monumental-decorative art combine. There he was among the first to revive old wrought-iron architectural traditions. Those works of his have become classics. Many also know him as a talented graphic artist and easel painter. Incidentally, he discovered this talent in himself in the early 1990s. His powerful creative potential also manifests itself outside the studio. In 1988, he accumulated professional decorative talent in a gallery he called Triptych. Seven years later, together with Kyiv’s Artists’ Union, he founded Gallery-38 on Andriyivsky uzviz, beloved by so many residents.
Public interest in his extraordinary personality has received a fresh impetus by the new canvases displayed in his current one-man show and by the theme the artist chose. Mythology is, of course, a fertile ground for the abstract art. They seem to have been created for each other, both being ephemeral and at the same time saturated notions, the way a ripe pear is heavy with juice. There are associations each sees in his own way. The romantic White Venus, formidable Abduction of Venus, or the playful Erection. Any of these canvases reminds one of a false-bottom box, secreting the author’s remarkable ability to find joys in life, rejoice at its bacchanalian rhythm and endlessness. This is precisely why the artist never uses black in his paintings.
