Mykola Bilous
A MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
22.03 - 10.04.2008
Mykola Bilous artworks catch the eye: there is a feeling something wrong here, as if image was turned inside out. He approaches the viewer with white dabs, which draw from dark background, while reminding ancient icon-painted faces that were created in the same manner. Art critics named Bilous technique "inversion".
NB lives and works in Kiev, were he is called as completed artist that looks incomplete, because of his style that seems careless, or more precisely - free and nothing attached to.
Moreover, an experienced artist draws in a way that can easily fool those, who trust the first impression. And, vice versa - for those, who feels and "sees", he gives an opportunity to guess and read the idea easily and gently.
Different people are in his focus: a girl with times of NEP hairstyle, a sprawled on a bench man, a woman with glass in crowded bar, workers in caps, sportsmen, cheerful feast. Bilous portraits are attracting, "vibrating", and luminous, because the author draws only the most unexpected details - eyes pupils, teeth, curls or cheeks with bright, saturated strokes.
"A man with a movie camera" is a second personal project of Bilous in gallery "ZEH". The idea appeared after Dziga Vertov movie, filmed in 1927, in Kiev.
The project aroused out from the movie- is an example of how is possible to give to art piece of another epoch the other embodiment in painting, which has other methods of affecting the viewer, and other contexts. And not only because this movie is easy to break up to "story boards" thanks to completed, sharp, and impressive shots; but because each shot addresses to great masters, as Picasso, Leger, Degas, which Bilous was able to read, to see, and to understand with his "Art-Eye".
Maria Khruschak