Dogs, pigs, fish, and ants flock together, on their own or under pressure. Such are the plots at Yurii DENYSENKOV’s exhibit “Instinct,” which is currently open at the Ya Gallery Art Center in Kyiv. This is the artist’s second personal project, which took him four years to prepare.
It all started with observing pigeons. “In my perception, these birds had always had a certain glorious image associated with Picasso’s works and good news. But when I saw pigeons coming down in flocks to feed on sunflower seeds, I felt that they were transforming into some sort of winged rats. This prompted the idea of such a series,” shares Denysenkov.
At times, there are so many animals pictured that they all blur together into what the author calls “the unconscious pulp.” “All the paintings, particularly those of multitudes, have a flat composition and picture a pure mass,” says Denysenkov. “I attempted to render this mass as a homogenous structure. In fact, at times I even aimed at abstraction. Although these are realistic paintings, I executed them in various versions, and some even turned into a black spot.”
The painter takes a distance from drawing parallels between the behavior of, let’s say, dogs and people. Dogs are dogs, and pigeons are nothing else but pigeons, but some behavioral models resemble those used by humans. However, animals are driven first of all by instincts, while humans need not follow them. They can make a conscious choice and estimate its consequences (of course, supposed they want to do so).
Giving way to instincts and getting trapped is one of the leitmotifs of the project. Fishes glitter in the net, ants are on the point of getting stuck in jam. Pigs wallow in their pen, but the name of the painting, Bacon, makes things clear.
“This exhibit is not about the crowd, it is about a mass,” muses Pavlo HUDIMOV, founder and curator of Ya Gallery. “Crowd and mass are opposite things. A crowd is a humanized concept and describes a conscious congregation of individuals. A revolution can be called a crowd, or a festival, a concert, or a school, for that matter. But here is the metaphor for a mass. All these animals flock together not without a reason. It all has a reason: either they eat, or they are being eaten. Take the caught fish, for instance. Have you ever seen a net full of fish being hauled out of water? It is a fascinating sight. Yes, it is coercion: fishes are caught to be sold, cooked, and eaten. It all has something ugly, unnatural, and yet unbelievably beautiful in it. Actually, this is what Yurii is playing with. I do not think that a human figure fits this picture. A human must think. I only want to use the metaphor from George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”
In Denysenkov’s opinion, art is generated by an individual, which is destroyed by mass. It is next to impossible to completely break loose from the mass, so one has to find a boundary, a point of distance, in order to be able to create. Where should one draw this boundary? And why do we actually sometimes flock together and form a mass? Denysenkov’s project asks these questions, but it is up to everyone to look for answers.
The exhibition “Instinct” is open at the Ya Gallery Art Center, Kyiv, through August 19.
