“If you don’t rush things, everything happens very harmoniously and smoothly” – says Dmitry Dulfan about his life and creativity. Just like that, unhurriedly and naturally, he had another turn-return to painting. The new painting immediately attracts attention with the simplicity and serenity of the images. Dmitry managed to achieve such a fragile balance and that very harmony mentioned earlier, and it shines through every canvas. The blue sky, which is so abundant in the new works, really produces the effect the author hoped for, naming his project “White Spirit/White spirit” – it cleanses, washes away all the excess, and leaves a feeling of light longing for the mythical “golden age,” and at the same time hope for achieving a peaceful state, in which apparently Buddha on the washing machine is. He sits so calmly on one of the hundreds of thousands of machines washing dirty laundry that you involuntarily begin to doubt the surrounding world and believe in its illusoriness. And the laundry is not ordinary; these colorful rags are none other than lungta – “wind horses” – special prayer flags of five colors with mantras printed on them, which serve to enhance and harmonize life energy. Hung everywhere in Tibet and India, they symbolize luck, well-being, and prosperity.
Besides painting, the White Spirit/White spirit project features the glowing objects that have already become Dulfan Jr.’s trademark. Perhaps the best way to describe the experience of contemplating Dulfan’s objects is this: you seem to dive from the pier at the 16th station of the Great Fountain into the warm Black Sea and open your eyes underwater, watch the aquatic world for a few seconds, and then surface into the dazzling sun. The just-seen images merge into one, and shimmering objects made of polyethylene and plastic appear before your eyes. What a paradoxical idea to recreate sea creatures from plastic, which, when ingested by jellyfish, dolphins, and hundreds of other marine species, leads to their inevitable death. Or maybe this is one of the faces of cloning, produced not by complex chemical and biological manipulations, but by an artistic act?
It should be noted that Dmitry Dulfan loves to give his works long poetic titles and also write fairy tales. In short, he does everything somewhat backwards: instead of illustrations for texts, he creates texts and explanations for paintings and objects, which, however, are quite independent and, as they say, speak for themselves. However, this technique adds a bit of subtle Eastern poetry to the White Spirit/White spirit project, which was no exception. “The moon is like a dear baby who talks with eternity and God at night” or “Lungta appearing in the sky is like thoughts, sky, and winds” – agree, quite elegant titles for paintings that make you think, but only for a second, and then return to contemplating the fluttering flags in the wind, vainly trying to decipher the words of one of the thousands of mantras.Comment type: Published comment
Author: Kateryna Filyuk
Bibliography:
“White Spirit” – a new project by Dmitry Dulfan at the Odessa gallery “HudPromo” [Electronic resource] // ART Ukraine. – 2011. – Access mode to the resource: http://artukraine.com.ua/n/belyy-duh-novyy-proekt-dmitriya-dulfana-v-odesskoy-galeree-hudpromo/#.V6SmYriLQhc.”White Spirit” – a new project by Dmitry Dulfan at the Odessa gallery “HudPromo” [Electronic resource] // ART Ukraine. – 2011. – Access mode to the resource: http://artukraine.com.ua/n/belyy-duh-novyy-proekt-dmitriya-dulfana-v-odesskoy-galeree-hudpromo/#.V6SmYriLQhc.
Sources: “White Spirit” – a new project by Dmitry Dulfan at the Odessa gallery “HudPromo” [Electronic resource] // ART Ukraine. – 2011. – Access mode to the resource: http://artukraine.com.ua/n/belyy-duh-novyy-proekt-dmitriya-dulfana-v-odesskoy-galeree-hudpromo/#.V6SmYriLQhc.”White Spirit” – a new project by Dmitry Dulfan at the Odessa gallery “HudPromo” [Electronic resource] // ART Ukraine. – 2011. – Access mode to the resource: http://artukraine.com.ua/n/belyy-duh-novyy-proekt-dmitriya-dulfana-v-odesskoy-galeree-hudpromo/#.V6SmYriLQhc.
