Artists Who Walks Where He Wants
by Dmytro HorbachovFrom: Vasyl Bazhay: Catalogue. Lviv, 1993
Ukrainians are born painters. And whenever history gives them a breath of air, they never lose their chance. The Age of Princes in our history was marked by the genius of Alimpiy Pechersky, the Kosak Age - by that of Hryhoriy Levytsky and Alimpiy Halyk; the 1910-1920s witnessed the flourishing of the talents of Arkhipenko, Malevych, Petrytsky, Tatlin, Exter, Yermilov. In the 1980s, when the reigns of censorship loosened (the bolsheviks were persecuting open dissidents but had no more energy to look for the "hidden" ones), the "furious youth started an offensive". I have been gladly following the play of lights at the exhibitions of young artists and have patiently waited for the coming of a master of the highest rank, who was sure to appear in the upsurge of Ukrainian creative activity. Last year, at his personal exhibition in Kyiv, I discovered for myself Vasyl Bazhay.
His large canvases emanated a mighty, gloomy force. His objectless compositions bore the stamp of either geological or psychological shifts, struggles and strains. Like hardened lava, the fragments of pictorial forms seemed to be thrown upon the canvas after melting in fire and then hardening in sullen rage into cold immobility. They demonstrated their affinity to almost all elements - the earth, water, air, heat and cold. This plasticity of latent fury conveyed the idea of not only geological but also ecological faults. The tight weightiness of Bazhay's pictures was engendered by the postindustrial age, which has burdened the earth, particularly that of Ukraine, with the unbearable load of the so called "material culture".
The astute art critic from Lviv Hryhoriy Ostrovsky was the first to notice ecology pressing upon Bazhay's conscience. He wrote: "Vasyl Bazhay's last cycles might be called "ecological", though this definition is too narrow, straightforward, pragmatic. It would be more felicitous to define the pathos of his painting as "ecology of spirit", free by origin, unaffected by the corrosion of modern pseudo-culture; ecology of morality and creative freedom, which he tries to follow persistently and selflessly, and finds in the sphere of art" (Suchasnist, No 11, 1992, p.p. 133-134).
As to corrosion. The rusted, corroded fragments of tools, spirals or simply deformed pieces of iron appear in his objects-installations side by side with natural (i.e. created by God) perfect forms - shining apples or, incomparable in their streamline form, eggs, the eternal accumulators of life, against the background of which the novelties of our age seem deadly and worthless.
As if heedless to "purity" of style (where can one find purity in our polluted Ukraine?), Bazhay sometimes violates the rules of objectless art and introduces into the chaos of his compositions hints of a pipeline or some other metallic construction, creating a sort of scraping aesthetics of discomfort for the spectator's eye.
The "carpet plane", traditional for abstract painting (as if seeing the earth from a bird's flight), is more complicated here than in the pictures of Malevych, Kandinsky or the American Pollock: Bazhay's sight is moving as a camera's eye. He spends a long time scrutinizing the accumulation (dump?) of pictorial spots (rather zones) to fix their texture: rough or smooth, loose as black earth, disfigured as scrap metal, quiet as the surface of a pond in fine weather, round or compressed. In this diversity of textures and materials, Bazhay is a genuinely Ukrainian artist. David Burliuk, the "persistent kosak with an immense heart", as his contemporaries used to call him, was one of the first to practice and interpret this pictorial dimension. Burliuk distinguished in painting different textures, such as "hooked, fine-and violently tortoise-shell like, thorny, dusty and glass-like..." Knobs and particles of clotted paint on our futurist's canvases are predecessors of Bazhay's manner of execution.
After close examination of his object, Vasyl seems to change the optics of his sight and begins "panoraming". In this case, a layer of paint appears on the canvases which is quieter in coloring (though more mystic in mood), devoid of nervousness, deliberately covered by a film of paint, hard as enamel.
Such overfalls of optical and psychological states, such "palimpoest" (deposition) make every work by Bazhay a sort of serial. The almost bottomless capacity is a rarity in our pictorial art. The changeability of this kind is rarely met even in literature with its much more flexible verbal and phonetic material. It is characteristic of Mike Johansen, the brilliant innovator of the 1920s, who wrote: "Remember our plane flight. The earth was like a relief map: an administrative look at the region from the geological, topographic and agricultural points of view. When we went by train, the earth appeared on both sides like two naturalistic side-scenes. From a geographical map it turned into theatrical scenery. Our trip became still slower and more picturesque when I rode on a bicycle. The path turned from simple to crooked and whimsical, and the earth lay in two planes - vertical and horizontal. And still the road continued. All plans vanished and only physical, corporeal life remained."
But there is a diametrical difference between the optimistic perception of the constructivist Johansen, who firmly believed in the possibility to organize the outer and inner world of man, and the tragic, almost baroque belief of modern man in the futility of such hopes. Vasyl, unlike Mike, looks, like Skovoroda, "inside himself" and sees there "bodily" and "cosmic" zones, bright horizons and dark precipices. And the flow of his observations is not consecutive: he jumps from one psychological step to another unconsciously and passionately. And the spaces of his pictures are like labyrinths of the soul. Where is the entrance, where the exit? Where is the mountain, where the valley? Bazhay does not look for orientation. He must pour out his psychological burden upon the canvas and from there on to the spectator. And when he feels that the tone of a completed picture has become sluggish, he, as he himself admits, looks at it for hours, hypnotizing it, feeding it with his own biocurrent.
Bazhay dreams to make the following happen (i.e. artistic action): mirrors are brought out, the space is multiplied and becomes more complicated, reflected endlessly in their bottomless depth. Then the mirrors disappear, leaving behind a recollection about the incomprehensibility of the world. His pictures make a similar impression.
Is chaotism a repressive state for an artist and a spectator? In Bazhay's case, by no means. He has got the following pop-art action: a real fence on the outskirts of a real village roughly boarded and wound with wire. A symbol of the desolation and casual character of modern man, the symbol of the carelessness of our life, its confusion and entanglement. And it turns out that, having realized such fate, such a situation, man does not lose heart. On the contrary, he is spiritually strengthened and seems to lift a heavy burden off his shoulders.
But Vasyl's primary aim is painting. "For about ten years until now, avoiding any advertisement or commercialism, he has not exhibited his works, has tried on neither a martyr's wreath nor the cloak of an unsung hero, but he has been earning his daily bread teaching at school. And all these days, months, years he has selflessly worked in a small attic stacked with canvases" (H.Ostrovsky).
Through unveiled antiaestheticism or indifference to elegant, perfectly measured composition (Dostoevsky said: in ugly times beauty in art smells false), Bazhay's dialogue with world culture is heard. From time to time, he would run away from the provincial stodginess of recent Lviv to Moscow, where Americans (pop-art of Raushenberg) and Britons (expressionist Bacon) were allowed to exhibit their works, an act forbidden in Kyiv or Lviv. The winds of XX century art is one more element which the soul of the antisocial artist was striving to penetrate. Every layer of his pictorial texture has something in common with the masters of the world. The quiet plane of his pictures sounds in tune with the heavy-metal suprematism, the massive crosses or squares, dark or, on the contrary, approaching a unified light tonality, make one remember the prophesies of Malevich: "In city art, distinct from cheerful village art, the active gamuts of black and white will occupy an honorable place". The bitter layers of Bazhay's consciousness are reflected on canvases in deformed plasticity and include an impulsive reminiscence of the tension with which the misanthrope Francis Bacon compressed clear proportions. Sometimes Paul Klee's staccato passes over a picture. And the energetic signature, which often crowns in the picture Bazhay's psychic act, resembles a friendly greeting from the calligraphic master Dubuffet. It is true, in distinction from the playful Frenchman, the Ukrainian artist's calligraphy creates associations with the wires of a prison. Is this not a sign of Bazhay's national belonging, a former inhabitant of a totalitarian system?