Building illusions distracts from the realization that the “real” world around is itself just an illusion. Therefore, teasing the viewer with “cardboard tricks,” Alexander Hnylytsky probably also indulges in this optical illusion himself. At first, like most artists of the generation that emerged in the late 1980s – early 1990s, he specialized in pictorial “simulacra,” incorporeal shadows, cute trifles (Hnylytsky’s early painting was branded as “cutism”), devoid of the weight of “genuine” pictoriality – solid texture, pompous meaning…
From the illusion of painting, Hnylytsky moved to the next level – to the illusion of reality. He never managed to resist the temptation, if not seriously, then at least jokingly, to try on the role of a “demiurge” – to play with three-dimensionality, with a visibility created by his own hands. This visibility no longer just resembles reality; the supertask of its creator is a picture that is more real than reality itself and filled with spectacular, stereoscopic ghosts of things… Spectacular – because their borderline existence in no way affects their good appearance. I want to pay the same compliment that the medium gives to the ghost woman in the comedy “Between Heaven and Earth”: “Oh, you are very much alive…” The story of these pictorial “ready-mades” by Hnylytsky began a few years ago when he painted the “Bugatti” cloak hanging on a hanger. In its strange animation, one could sense that special attitude towards the Thing, which became the main hallmark of modernity – it turned into an “object of desire,” replacing the sacred object. Hnylytsky collects his collection of fetishes, simultaneously adhering to two opposite lines – pop-art and trash. If pop artists worship the cold, impeccable, divinely detached beauty of expensive materials trying to seem eternal, then “junk dealers” see in used things an alter ego sharing their fate – like a person, they get tired and wear out. Hnylytsky is interested in both these poles of “thingness,” easily switching his interest from the chic contents of expensive boutiques to the junk piled up at the Dacha, and the register of emotions – from consumer delight to the desire to “touch and be touched”…Comment type: Published comment
Author: Viktoria Burlaka
Sources: Gallery “CEH” invites to the exhibition of Alexander Hnylytsky “Dacha” (painting). 9.12.2005 – 8.01.2006 (press release). – Electronic resource. – Access mode: http://www.gif.ru/afisha/dacha/
