Having experienced its peak in the 1980s, the postmodernist “new wave,” mostly associated with neo-baroque, neo-expressionism, programmatically neglecting any structured integrity and cultivating the esoteric, sacred, bricolage, inevitably prepared the topicality of aphorisms like: “Down with the ‘new wave,’ long live the calm!” Behind this is the increasingly felt need precisely for integrity, structure, clarity. The “war on the whole,” declared earlier, increasingly gives way to a “nostalgia for unity,” some kind of classicizing art. <…>
It is clear that this concerns the premonition of a false integrity, false structure, those very artificial pseudostyles conceived in a test tube (exactly so – in the plural) of the contemporary cycle of another era of Hellenism. The modeling of private situations of the declining “decadent art” – some kind of non-normative, precisely decadent idioclassicism. Where it is unclear what predominates – actual classicism or still mannerism, baroque, rococo, or already romanticism… Ostentatious illness or ostentatious health – simulation or dissimulation…Comment type: Published comment
Author: Oleksandr Solovyov
Sources: Solovyov O. The Defunct Art [Text] / Oleksandr Solovyov // Exhibition booklet “Calm.” – Kyiv, 1992. – p.2
