The end of the world, predicted to happen on December 21, is frightening most people no more, while artists, endowed with lively imagination and desire for individual expression, have drawn on it to create many fantastic and realistic images. The KhudPromo gallery in Odesa is currently displaying an exhibition devoted to this very topic, an original art project by the gallery’s consultant and head of the New Art Association Mykhailo Rashkovetsky, called “And for Now, We Have the Apocalypse on Offer.”
Explaining his design, the art critic said: “The crisis has become the norm! Apocalypse is now part of the everyday life. All this would be sad, if not for art. After all, as they say, art is long, life is short!” By the way, the theologians teach that the apocalypse should not be viewed pessimistically, as it is not the end, as commonly thought, but the revelation of a profound mystery, restoring all the matter during the world’s salvation.
“The Apocalypse Diaries” is a series of small-sized paintings by Alina Hordiienko. According to the artist, she wanted to imagine every day of her life as the last one. It forced her to discard all things unnecessary and petty, to grasp the essence of the everyday phenomena. These paintings are, therefore, pretty subjective artistic expressions, but they were designed for active perception, provoking the viewer’s mind into entering into a dialogue with the author. Interestingly, all Hordiienko’s days look tremendously different. While some of them are just touching sketches of flowers, fish or dolls, most of the paintings are attempts to find a symbolic expression for our controversial present, which is sometimes ugly and even caricature-like.
Ihor Husiev’s “Twelve Minutes of Attention, Stolen from Humankind” cycle looks like a diary, too, only this time the diary is a large-format one. It displays allegorical images and modern youths whose minds are captivated by various worldly lusts. Clear graphic images done by black paint on aluminum foil background emphasize the coldness of the environment. The works are overtly journalistic and even poster-like, their meanings are easily read. Serhii Bielyk’s diptych is somewhat similar, too, with its pair of doors, half real and half virtual. Multicolored door marked Enter (in English in the original) looks like a promise of some mysterious pleasure, while the entirely black one marked Exit is scary. In contrast, Dmytro Diulfan’s 3D bogey lamps are just funny, one looking like some fantasy creature of dragon kind and called The Alien’s Mother, and another appearing to be a square-shaped full moon. Interestingly, they were made according to the author’s own technique, using multicolored polyethylene, melted and mounted on metal frames.
Eclectics, intended or accidental, is the norm in contemporary art, so artists tend to invent not just new visual styles, but new creative techniques, too. Larysa Zviezdochotova’s White Embroidery, depicting a girl with a fawn, seems to be a decorative panel that our grandmothers used to embroider. It is, however, an imitation of embroidery and kind of a parody of the old sentimental topics, because molded paste was substituted for threads there.
The painter Anatolii Hankevych is a quite successful imitator of the mosaic ceramics. His techniques give the image an emphasis on monumentality. The artist likes also to shock the viewer by a combination of incompatible and placing various explosive surprises on his panels. Thus, a fantastic peacock lights the outer space with its dazzling white feathers in Stupidity of the Beauty. His Explosion of the Suprematism panel, which has become the symbol of the exhibition, shows a combination of galactic shine or nuclear explosion with the energy and fury of the young. The three boys are depicted there in their breakneck flight, seemingly rushing for the sun. They fear neither the end of the suprematism, which is ejecting debris of the early 20th century’s avant-garde art, nor the promised end of the world. Artists saw it through the eyes of the Odesites, these incorrigible optimists.
