POSEI OF DEAR KUTA
Technogenic age and dizzying inventions of civilization caused the emergence of “real” aesthetics as early as the 1920s. The then constructivists admitted: “I’ve been hopelessly in love with the things I have long know by heart dozens of catalogs photographic cameras, guns, bicycles, binoculars, objects, and when I happen to catalog sextant or microscopes that NMI I can not do , I would also study this directory by heart. ”
(Mark Johansen)
Dmytro Nagorny can understand the words of the predecessor. On the table in his Kiev workshop are catalogs of cars and other vehicles. He loved modern-day hipperrealizm – painting, it swore “rechovosty”: nymovirna materiality, increased focus and hard holohrafichnist each of the countless details, precision photographic image.
But unlike the 1920’s, it does not cause the grips of the former enthusiasm. Technically perfect, they, things, look at their paintings indifferent, and not just hostile to man.
Dmitry, Bouva, shows on his canvases hyper-realism of the highest degree. The acrylic “Weekend” 1987 is perceived first as an apology for Americanism: the newest Cadillac and Ford, depicted with engineering-designer illusions, in conjunction with naked women’s bodies, create a kind of post-advertising activity that involuntarily thinks: there is no past and future, there is only eternal modernity . But he does not sit on the Nutcracker in America: excessive technicalism sounds like irony on the canvas; I do not give a woman an elementary eroticism: her body is treated with European nobility like mountains and waves.
Immunity against materialist pragmatism was grafted to Dmitry at the Kiev Art Institute of the 1970s. There, the doctors of dogmatics of Leninism in their lectures fell into a grotesque, “in a shameful misunderstanding of Marxism,” arguing that technological progress and material interests determine the course of world history. And not spiritual impulses and needs, including the need for aloghizma, secrets, riddles.
On one of the booklets devoted to Dmitri and published in Germany, reproduces his work “Chanel number 5” homeless, he seeks in vain to drink while standing among water like thirsty Tanal of Greek myth. Under this description there is an inscription – Dmytro Nagurnyi, and we can think that this character of the picture, an unlucky traveler, a seeker of a distant fate – the second “I” of the artist himself.
In the minds of the artist, a clear rational world is associated with a deadlock of impotence. But he did not shy away from those stuffy Zakutnya on his canvases podybuyemo many blind yards with closed doors and windows dark, deserted entrances and driveways with black interiors, fragments of some bizarre architecture with columns, which have nothing to keep ungrounded ladder .. Fences inexorably go deep into the depths of the prospect, and the pavement, by contrast, seems to be about to throw stones at the viewer. Anhydrous pools show their emptiness with the help of the unnatural, so called. Reverse reduction. The artist, having started the architectural “suite of a deadlock” from the perverse realism, continues in an absurd direction and extracts a zone called surrealism.
“Architectural Fantasy”: the metaphysical space of primitive elements – sky, water and land – built cyclopean scenery – paschekoyu wall with arches, covered with trees and colorful stripes oblivion unsolved mystery characters age-old religions. The mythological cipher of this ancient building appears to be more livelier than the code of modern technology, which it (the technique) represents on that picture of the car, thrown into a dump of history – an inhuman monument to the consumption society. But the work has a continuation: the painter finishes, it would seem, modifies the picture, the image of the car seems to be enlightening, removing from it a funeral loop. Auto, for Nagornym – the creation of human genius, it is human, not God, and because of this dangerous. Painter immersed in stunning design division of stubbornness and disability draftsman and inventor, repeating the mantra of technical and design features of this elegant Packard, motor four times, number of cylinders – eight turnovers – 4500 per min., Body type – rodoster. And suddenly from this industrial magic, the artist pulled into the sky, where he saw and portrayed some amazing adventures – two light cones, made of transparent air.
Dmytro Nagorny reminds me of the baroque master. He does not bypass the earthly matter, but even saves all its plastic-texture properties. But one can not be content with it, because the spirit is looking for another shelter, boundless, extraterrestrial, incomprehensible to the mind. The impoverished walls of its buildings under the pressure of the spiritual foundation swell with the pediments, stretching to the sky with their Baroque winding domes. The sky for the artist is the sphere of spirituality, it is multilayered, as in the “Divine Comedy” of Dante, and is denoted by stripes, as in the old icon.
And if the algorithm of Surrealists of Western Europe in the dark, lackluster subconscious, our artist hopes for enlightenment, he wants to go to the light, which was previously called unspeakable, unvary. This is a surrealistic picture of Nahourny’s “Entrance”. Deaf wall with picturesque dirty patches, thick with a fortress, tambourine attic-pediment, some sort of resembles the ancient Egyptian sculptural heads. The slit in the wall leads to the salvific celestial space, and over the wall go clapping, two-dimensional, conditional forms of pure spirituality: the strip is dark, the lane is lighter with the crossroads, and the third lane – blavat with the radiance of a rounded luminaire. Dirt and purity, volume and flatness, fluid geometry and geometricity are clear, prosaic realism and spirituality. And the perfect proportional system, as if tuned to the flawlessness of the cosmic universe. At the same time, silent silence of this picture is frightening so much that I want to escape from the destruction of the human crowd. But Nagornyi prefers mono (solitary) life in art, and in earthly scenes the background is behind the scenes, leaving the viewer only the things of his own use. Those things of daily consumption in the painting “On the second day” are made by the artist in a still life: a fruit box, a bottle, a glass and an apple snack. Still life resembles a presbytery with communion gifts. And that is not a blessing, but a respect for “Roya” mass survival.
The story about architectural fantasies is completed by a picture-varia on the themes of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra: the white-faced buildings came together and surrounded the grave cross. One of the houses is the coat of arms of patron of Hetman Mazepa. Loosely like a thorny crown, the tree is dying of that sadness of sorrow. Is not that the landscape from the burial ground of the “miriskunika” by George Narbut? It turns out no. The golden-waxy color covered the grass, the walls, the roofs. Blue sky brings up a graphic network of dry branches. Tree trees are now perceived as “sanchez”, their color defiantly retreats to the golden tone of glare.
THE LIGHT IS NEGATIVE, Divine impulse spilled on our hyper from the Orthodox icon. As you know, rationalism and practicality killed the sacrament, interrupted contact with the afterlife, which caused a serious trauma to the mental health of mankind.
Nutrition is once again cleared from the prose of earthly gravitation, drawing icons according to ancient Byzantine schemes. Bold figures of the saints involved in the fiery mystical element, the golden radiance of the spiritual Christian space is the conditional cubic architecture, which shakes when it is in the magnetic field of high energies. In the “Dormition”, the Nutrient casts the sky to the ground: on the earth, the death of Mary, in the parabolic sky over which the cherubim hovers – resurrection and eternal life.
Of the icons of the 14th century. Dmitri draws light vibration from the icons of the 15th-16th centuries. – color purity and op-artic effects. In the “new icon” we see an abstract composition of the crosses and squares of the icon painter Dionysius, where I rule the law of reversal, when the correct geometric figures change places, then speaking to the foreground, then turning into a background; Above this decorative composition in the spirit of op-art have like a wing (or bangs?) Two corrugated planes, sparkling with intangible, phosphorous-ghostly light.
“Archangel Misail” 1990 emits a light-colored, moire-shining brightness that can be seen only as “sensual-soul eye” (speaking the language of theologians). This metaphysical figure is fundamentally different, as in the Surrealist Magritt, highly respected by Nagorny. From Magrito frozen characters blow cold, from the Dmitrov archangel there is a stream of heat.
Dmitry is like a sensitive locator, he perceives mystical waves. At such moments, objects, people, buildings in his paintings move from their axes, approaching the state of weightlessness (see “St. Andrew’s Cathedral – a space ferry” or “The Light of Ancient Ancestors”).
But we do not treat Nagorny as a religious artist. He is primarily a painter and is eager to create artistic quality. Sacred motives – tablets, nymbs, crosses, human and divine silhouettes, he puts into a solid decorative composition, makes energetic futuristic shifts, stylizes abstract symbols in the spirit of artists Makarenko and Shemyakin. That is, he communicates, argues or denies the modern, close to his heart’s meters of the twentieth century.
The first samples of iconic themes date back to 1975. The then young monumentalist was preparing himself for the contemporary themes, for multi-meter collage paintings and stained-glass windows (he would carry them out in different cities of Ukraine during the 1980’s – Radiology, Progress, Blue Planet). One stained glass was called “Mysteries of the Space”; the sketch is an original abstract composition composed of various effects, remotely similar to the densities. Subsequently, there will come an insight (or enlightenment?) That the greatest cosmic secret is the microscope of human spirit and soul. And then, in 1975, a small, like a feather pen, decorated semi-jarring “Maria” appeared – a nude girl, brachiopod and chest, and fertilized with rainbow and dove (the picturesque echo of “Gavrilia” by Pushkin). Pushkin, as is known, has come down from religiosity from youthful blasphemy. Though there was a bit of it, but entering into the realm of religious subjects, Nagornyi was impatient with its glow.
VARIATIONS ON THE THEME “NU”
From the time of the art academies, an impeccable ability to draw a naked nature was considered a sign of professionalism. Dmitry this genre is needed not as a visiting card specialist. To him who draws the industrialized world – devices and devices, cars and ships, weapons and planes, I want to touch God’s creature, to the living Nature. The presence of a woman on his canvases creates an atmosphere of wonder, a distant mystery. Here is the “Hotel Yalta”: if the mild forms and the warm bodily color of the naked girl were not, then the designer’s supermodel utensils with its auspicious mechanics and a tense scale of colors from frozen-blue to hot-red, that design world would look as devastating.
I already said how a player is fitted in the landscape order of valleys and humps on the canvas “Weekend”. Close to her and the popular painting thing “Far from Kiev” is an energetic statement on the theme “nature and technique”, accentuated the opposition of two mechanisms opposite to the plastic of the newly established hard (auto) and the eternal, flexible (female, articulate). The woman appears to be part of the world order, its fecundary model in such works as “Bride” 91 and “Bride” 89. The motif of the magic chandelier, which reflects the light divided into infinite phases and planes, is used here. The female body is distributed to all sectors and segments of the universe. That is the image of the Grandmaster of the World, made for a futuristic post.
The opposite idea is embodied in another picture. “Woman on Dassy”: against the background of a split, some kind of ghost town, only a woman is the immaculate eternal integrity against the backdrop of shabby houses. Her, young and rather fragile, was elevated to an allegorical stage in a theatrical ritual way: under her feet the artist erected a complex architectural pedestal. And in order not to immortalize this image, he put it on a thin Viennese bent chair.
As a rule, the artist portrays a woman in a bodily, volumetric, “cortical” manner. But the instinct of “disintegration” somehow intervened in this genre. The night sky in one of the paintings removed the silhouette of a slender virgin, and the moon seems to be due to its origin due to it. Mythological, primitive thinking was revived in the work. The archaic legend about the origin of the galaxy from the chest of the goddess Aphrodite dates back to memory.
CHURCH
As Taras Shevchenko in the new city, first of all, he went to the local church, to the pastor, a regional specialist, so that Nogurnyi does not pass the temple while traveling with Kiev or Novgorod, Cologne or Aachen. If he draws fantastic, imaginative cities, he will certainly decorate them with a house of prayer.
The temple is the sky on earth. In the painting “Vision” the church itself with its architecture of a gusto forces the rocket to take off the heavy stone of buildings in the severed heavens, illuminate the windows of the stained glass with a golden dream and red sadness, admires the Divine beauty of the deep Violet, prompts and the sky itself shines in a pink color of paradise rest and illuminates In the zenith emblem of the spiritual universe – a rainbow, round, as a target for the most crazy desires.
In the crown of the thorns of Kiev trees, there appears the Byzantine circular Vladimir’s Cathedral and the baroque walls of the Lavra Corps. Dreamy “Waiting” – the installation of real and imaginary: a nightly interior with a silent phone explodes nostalgic visions; All the symbols of hope created by the Nut (wing, multicolored striped track, trembling church, squeezed into a frozen pyramid of glass and granite) aspire to the stars. When from the objects of earthly life the cold of the hopelessness (“Autumn Message”) is saved, the vindication of the Icon, warm, as the bosom of Abraham, is saved by the petty mind.
“Old Aachen” blossoms with a spectrum of stained-glass windows from the mausoleum of Charlemagne. The hard frame of Dmitrovskoy manir is softened here. The spots of the violet colors are located, they change with nuances, become factored into jewels of the Celtic and Gothic priests. Those colorful arches are flying in space, and as if from the wind, the architectural volumes of the cathedral are lying around, laying down the laws of universal gravitation.
Chotory variants of “Cologne Cathedral” – four states of the soul of the painter. On one of the pictures of burning orange syayevom famous museum painting where Nahurnyy met with the owner of a collector Ludwig and hulk church retreats, flies. On the other, the colors fade Museum, El hrekivskoyi zelenavosti shall strilchasti walls of the cathedral and the Rhine scaly water supply and chaotic surface of the celestial abyss create the mood of uncertainty, as if the artist hesitated, where is it stipule – either in the museum or in a church.
Painting feelings are up in the air-photorealistic fourth picture. Here, the Nutrition goes hand in hand for Richter, the most illustrious hyper-realist of our time, for the greatest contemporary artist in Germany.
A conscious Ukrainian, a direct witness of the Chernobyl disaster, Dmitry often milked the cow of grief. There is a series of paintings in the church that can even put into a congestion even a hard-working heart. The picture is divided into two psychologically opposite zones: on the left – the gray cold world of non-life with a metaphysical mysterious figure and inadequate shadow from it. But to the right there is no comfort: the crimson glow of the sky with the double (nonsense?) Light burns so much. On the background of the total sunset, gray, dry trees turned into black spines.
“TIMELY REPRESENTED …”
(MV Gogol)
It will be about abstract and occult works of Nagorny. “Rechovyk” technically hervorragend (outstanding), as written about him in the German press, under the influence of God (or the devil?) Knows which pushes rozpredmechuyetsya begins to paint feverishly, disorderly, neskuto. Drawing of compositions retreats to the desperate choreography of the brush (“Game” 90). The symbols and emblems lose their sign and turn into a spot, mascara, a baton. Consciousness almost does not control the movement of smears, frescoes, strokes. The instinct of order is exhaustively looking for a painting disorder, indicating only the direction of movement. This is the work “The Road to Home”. Nutrition does not seem to know itself. Only Latin letters N.D. (Nourdy Dmitry), barely seen in the picturesque veil, rule for road signs, orientalis.
In his abstractions black and red colors of hell are on fire. The most delicious of them “Palay, glow brightly” 91: golden and blavaty colors, like firewood in the stove, are burned in the aggressive strands of the colored flame.
Temperament, freed from the shackles of consciousness, suddenly threw painter in fonizm (barbarism), the focus of formlessness, the explosive (as Salvador Dali would say) beast of the field. This psychological experience of the artist was blurred in the diabolical picture “Basavryuk,” named after the devil from the story of Gogol. Stained glass, it should remind of the colorful interior of the Catholic temple; Ornamental, refers to the “Tree of Life” – the painting of the Ukrainian house. But the dominance of black and ominous red, combined with rigor green, casts infernal-boshivskyy mood and reminds creepy voodoo act Basavryuka:
“A blue flame came out of the ground. The middle of it all lit up and became as if it was poured out of a crystal. And all that was under the ground, it became apparent on the palm of the hand – the Chervontsy, dear stones … Everything was covered in red. The trees in the blood seemed to burn and moan. The sky shivered with heat. Fiery spots that zippered in his eyes. ”
(MV Gogol)
Recognizing the dreams of passion, the artist returns to the silence of deepened expectation and begins the usual start from the table with the modern communion gifts – telephone and wine. Overcoming the frosty steps up (such as a Jacob’s skylight on the sky), fighting through the drab of a dark tree, climbing over a deaf cemetery, it floats through a swirling wing and the rainbow’s edge to the whirling sun (“Waiting”). This way – an individual, he only gets through, Nourdy Dmitry. Which, however, does not hide the fact that Andrei Rublev and Jasper Johns, Guttuso, Bruegel, and Bogomazov are taking knowledge and experience. However, as noted German art “Nahurnyy reaches a fully self-expression regardless of stylistic elements and eras, and he knows what he possessed; He intensively combines neorealistic influences with iconic art, and high flows with naive directions – with pop art included “.
His darkest content in the picture is echoed with occult divination. “Magical track”, with bizarre haze consciousness arises as Japanese characters, red design that echoes it suddenly cells from children’s game “tic-tac-toe.” And children’s fun, without which modern life can not do, was once a sacred game, the ordination of consecration, psychological protection from the evil forces of “the carnal world matter.” Uhynayetsya and bulges under pressure which is not very energy-colorful corrugated “Gonfalon Nahurnoho” with dips and depressions Highness passing light and dark streams. From their whirlwinds there are crosses and intersections, squares and triangles. Not from the fields of Malevich and Miro put them in the possession of Nahuroy? The occult knowledge is silent, the “Magic Diamond” is deafening. “The wheel of causality does not turn around here. Instead, the painting is full of voices – forms, shifts, vibration smears, op- and pop-artistic effects. And the paradox of thinking, the inconsistency of meanings, and the logical comparisons.
The affinity of art with the riddle has never been completely lost. Excessive clarity was due to the lack of Dostoevsky: “In logic, he said, contains all the tension.” In our time, as in the Middle Ages, the hermetic poetry is appreciated, where the soul deprives itself of abandonment and bottomless ignorance. True, prose-minded people claim that poets mud water to make it appear deeper. But the one who wants to touch the levers of beauty must stir up his imagination with the help of senselessness – this poker of creativity (according to the Ukrainian absurdity of one hundred Igor Terentiev).
OPTIMIST WITH LIFE EXPERIENCE
(epilogue)
“The stars seek your soul, but internal dogs are asking outward,” said the hero of Nietzsche. Once, a young Dmitry wanted to breathe only with ozone air. “Heavens over the clouds” 75: Cumulus clouds like a whipped off massed brain mass, traversed by the horizontals of traces from … (airplane?). Now, over the years, Nagornyi does not overlook the garbage wind, his optimism became skeptical, more pessimistic. As in the proverb: the pessimist is an optimist with life experience. Here are his latest works, the Nordland Landscapes: massive old merchant warehouses from time to time, maybe the Hanseatic League of the Baltic sister cities. The luminous gloomy world – in the mood close to the German romance of Friedrich, with a mildly hyper-realistic performance – to Gergard Richter (G.Richter). Those analogies rather long for its cautious nordlandshafty (bristling?) Silence, some original, inhibited dumped on “Metaphysics” Italian de Chirico.
In the air of Nagorny it is both bad and fun. Postmodern architecture “Clinic in Aachen” from the respiratory tract lining of pipes and mondriyanivskym fence painter turned on partiti frequent enamel something comforting and children are in the care factory. But that solace is short-lived. Clinical mood is perceived as barely alive, like an aquarium grass and impenetrable in its blue, thickened sky. But above all, the pioneer feeling is reigning. As if the path that the artist was walking in, he drove him out to Mars.
The viewer can trust Dmitry as a conductor in the field of art. I do not get it with him, maybe, but he will prove to the oasis.
So, How to outline D. Nahourny’s artistic silhouette? Artist complex, “bahatooblomnoho profile” (to use architectural language) polistylist in mind both of which are highly developed two streams: rational design plastytsyzm (so-called American Psychological complex) and inspired sincerity (Kiev Caves descent, grew up as Dmitri On the Pechersk hills, inspired to this day by the mystical poetry of the icon painter Alimpiy). The combination of these seemingly polar qualities in one individual pendulum swings imagination, psyche denies peace, raises many plastic combinations and variations. One can say that his creative range lies between the earthly and the heavenly.
Hyperrealism is filled with anticipation of take-off, prone to fiction and surrealistic transformations, and often (almost unforeseenly) is referred to as lyrical notes. At the same time, as in Abstracted works, the Nahuru Spirituality is said to be urechevlen, has an internal architectonics, a picturesque texture and rigor.
What is continually magnitude in Dmitrov’s paintings is a harmonious, proportional system – an equivalent to the coordinate system, which holds the equilibrium of the universe on it.
June 22, 1996 Kiev