The Cultural and Informational Center of the Ukrainian Embassy in France was the last place to host the CAPRIces project by the well-known Lviv artist.
It will be recalled that the two previous exhibits under this title were successfully held in Kyiv and Lviv. The capital of France organically “received the baton” of the author’s esthetic inspirations in its most appropriate cultural place.
What also added to the intrigue of this event was the fact that, displaying a collection of pictures, Mykhailo Sydorenko seemed to call the classic Ukrainian and French painting to a symbolic dialog and become a mediator between tradition and the present. The artist’s individualized interpretation of light and color in his canvases makes it possible to draw precisely this professional conclusion about the exhibit’s concept.
Sydorenko’s impressions are transformed through his individual sensitivity, whose flows incessantly “attack” his beauty-sensitive nature. Emphasis on a light-bearing color localizes his artistic goals, accordingly configuring the genre-and-theme system of his painting. The master’s motifs for his new project suggest that man and the milieu are integrated into a single lyrical and semantic space. By the artist’s intuitive maneuver, the sun, the fascinating boundless blue, the rocky seashores, and exotic trees seem to be catching the nude female body, turning it into a metaphysical substance.
These paraphrases with classics are not accidental because the artist is working out step by step his own strategy of painting, adapting the technical and expressional means of impressionism and expressionism to the set goals.
In the past few years, the author has focused still more in his work on this immensity of the sensitive expression of nature. Every hue applied to the canvas’ surface is structurally rich in its very base, as it conveys the flexing of the “muscles” of the author’s excited artistic nature.
CAPRIces “illuminates” the polyphonic light-colored palettes, which have different esthetic experiences, through the prism of the existence of Sydorenko, an author who reacts very subtly to the mood vibrations in the life of man and nature. The exhibit of his works attracts one with its numerous mysteries in the Mediterranean sentiments and air conveyed through the excited feelings of a profound lyricist and philosopher whose soul shows variable conditions of incomprehensible essentialities.
This exhibit has also brought back to Paris the atmosphere of the bohemian hangouts of Ukrainian and French artists in the first half of the 20th century, when you could come across Oleksa Hryshchenko, Vasyl Khmeliuk, Mykhailo Andriienko-Nechytailo, and other prominent Ukrainian artist dreamers along the Seine banks, in the Luxembourg Garden, or on the Montmartre hills.
Like his great predecessors, Mykhailo Sydorenko, an artist with a contemporary figurative mindset, has presented his project supported by the Ukrainian Embassy in France as a reminder to numerous visitors of the important function of art as an intercultural communication, as one of the most effective forms of projecting Ukraine’s high cultural image in the world.
Roman Yatsiv is Pro-Rector of the Lviv National Academy of Arts
