🗓️Friday, May 6, 2011
6:30pm-10:00pm
FRANTS GALLERY SPACE
📍81 Wooster St, 4th fl, New York, NY 10012 USA
📧rsvp@frantsgallery.com
📞 +1 (212) 343-0104
ST. PETERSBURG ARTS PROJECT
warmly invites you to attend the opening reception of
“The Blue Sky Will Never Stain”
an exhibition by artist -VITALY PUSHNITSKY-
Blue Sky Will Never Stain:
Sky is one of the subjects that I have started addressing since the years 2005-2006 because of the thoughts on a phenomenon of the abstract in the real. Understanding the depth of a diverse and profound context that might lay behind the notion of skies, I realize that, in reality, the sky, as an experience separate from a human being, does not exist. This is just a color that is spread above us and above the horizon. This is akin to the theory of social contract: to invest so much into nothing, just into that, which constantly serves as scenery of our existence.
Contemplating paintings of the old masters, one could say that they used the subject of sky in the body of a painting as a certain counterpoint, whether chromatic, conceptual or metaphysical. Sky was the most remote point from the object and from the viewer. Sky was the sign that instantly defined boundaries and distances, but, at the same time, the sky, the painting of sky (for instance, the cold blue), even color-wise, counters the painting’s structure. Sky invades the surface of a canvas with a new abstract surface that sometimes overlays by its state the inner perspectives of a pictorial subject. In any case, sky is not viewed independently, but only as a fragment, a part of the subject, for intensifying the narrative and so forth; the sky by itself is no figurant of the events. Sky frames the object; it is behind the object; it is its background. However, I bring the sky forward, providing this principal acting object with benchmarks and quotation marks in order to see the sky proper in this pure blue, but I leave enough of the space for the contemplation of the nature of this color, state and space.
The exhibition is shaped according to the formal principle, following the emergence of the subject of sky in my various works:
Part of the series no man’s land, in which the pictures are divided into two parts by the horizon and where there is a struggle between the subjective and the objective through the presence of photography in painting.
The series north sea where there is an emphasis on the similarity between the abstract painting and the photography of real clouds. The one ensues from the other, merging and forming a continuous image.
The series books where the very image of the narrative is destroyed by a gesture of the cutting and overlaying of the text by the color and transforming it into a flat and, at the same time, profound thing.
Some works from 2006 with the subject of clouds are rendered in the technique of traditional oil painting. Stylistically, these paintings refer us to the theme of painting of the old masters; however, the paintings are devoid of the subject. The clouds are bestowed with the position not of the second (back) ground, but they rather come to the foreground as a protagonist. A part of the series news is a reflection of the TV newscasts that are imbued with tragic events in the society. Addressing the subject of smokes, much like that of abstract clouds, is the same attempt to turn the consequence into the cause and to turn the news regime of informing into the contemplative one.
An artist always draws pictures out of himself. That which he represents always breaks through him. The subject of sky is a hopeless attempt to forget about oneself.
Vitaly Pushnitsky