Mykhailo Krasnyk
Mykhailo Krasnyk: Non-objective assemblages at the Korsak Museum
Mykhailo Krasnyk (1955 – a famous Ukrainian artist, one of the founders of Ukrainian tactile abstraction in graphics and painting. The new project “Non-objective assemblages” – speaks of the awareness of the absurdity that has been felt in space lately. Objects that have gone out of use, their combination, which has no logical connection – actually exacerbate a vulnerable attitude towards reality. The surfaces of objects are hard, they hurt like reality and the only resistance is to create your own logic of forms, which the artist himself is able to control. Therefore, his non-objective reality is like a form of resistance to reality, and the new harmony is a model of a new objective order.
Non-objective forms in Krasnyk’s assemblages were still in the mid-1990s, because he needed a new reality on the ruins of the old social order. Therefore, the objective irony with blocks of wood, plastic metaphors – were such a Dadaist grotesque, as if: “…you live in your world, I’ll create another one, because I’m tired of yours…” At that time, no one took Krasnyk’s antics seriously, because everyone was doing experiments: original and secondary… There were many of them. At that time, Mykhailo was still making “matrices” on paper, graphic compositions using the technique of blind embossing and using postage stamps. That “tactile garbage” was perceived by everyone as plastic virtuosity, and Krasnyk himself saw in it the logic of fixing time in objects. Krasnyk was not alone in those exercises, because Lviv guru Vlodko Kaufman and all his Lviv epigones also glued postage stamps. But Krasnyk is always consistent in the observed textures, because the stamps and scraps of paper were soon followed by fragments of various materials, parts of metal, and wood. Ultimately, the apogee of these textures was the design of the “Bidon” bar in Lviv, where Mykhailo gave himself full rein and displayed all the Soviet-stereotypical garbage in three large-scale assemblages-windows.
The language of assemblages was completely different after Covid 2019, because the artist almost literally retells his vision of the apocalypse: with imaginary landscapes of the wasteland and the “mushroom of a nuclear explosion.” Over time, this imagery acquires the qualities of a new logic, where the artist seems to construct the world of what will come after the wasteland. Elements of past history indicate new coordinates, like the “new Suprematism” of the 21st century. The intersubjective connections of Krasnyk’s spatial compositions only roughly resemble the forms of our world: they have its elements. The logic of these connections is devoid of objectivism, because the artist constructs detached thoughts.
The new round of Mykhailo Krasnyk’s creative evolution after February 2022 should already be perceived as a topography of movement: for some it is an escape, for others – new vectors of development. Behind all this lie the locations of Krasnyk’s imagination, which gives a feeling of space and freedom. It seems that new art must be objectless, so as not to create new false simulacra of reality.
The exhibition project was carried out in collaboration with the Korsak Museum of Contemporary Ukrainian Art and CIM Mercury.
author: Bohdan Mysiuga
