Mykola Bilous
APPOLONIDE
5.09 - 20.12.2014
Life of art after death of painting: Mykola Bilous case
Painting of Mykola Bilous is a life after death.
Postmodernists announced death of painting many years ago.
In the series of "Appolonide" (under film of the French director Berthran Bonello, 2011) rather human world is dying, being totally deeped into various sins.
Artist 's position is off the sinful world of insane humans.
His art is a post-media one, due to a fact that it is after the cinema.
Dziga Vertov's "Cameraman" used investigations of history of visual culture, and after nearly century painting takes a victory back, making stop motions of different situations from the brothel.
In stop motion of time there is an eternal life of art.
Bilous is a visioner, artist who is "off the rules".
Outstanding position of Bilous painting in the Ukrainian contemporary art lays also in his own aphoristic conception of history of visual art.
Here it is.
1. Classical Chinese art. Plain in complex, and complex in plain. Principle of laconic expression.
2. Eugene Delacroix. Color as a compositional element, "Freedom on barricades".
3. Marcel Duchamp. Context of artistic expression, "Fountain-pissoir".
However, artist used Giorgio Morandi's "false tone", who added black color to other basic colors, which were red, blue, and yellow, along with revolutionary experience of Fernand Leger, who liberated "color from shape".
In Bilous' case, color from shape was liberated by not neon shining of the Times Square' ads, but by black sky of polar Chukotka.
Artist was working as a visual designer there, trying to get classical Chinese minimalism, but it was really hard for him to overcome a total domination of black color' polar sky.
In honor of victory over black square of black sky' emptiness, and also as a vital element of composition, black color is used to fill in all gaps of Bilous' painting series.
In "Appolonide", and this is new in artist's conception of color, white color is also vital, emphasizing festival dresses of prostitutes.
So, Morandi's "false tone" is re-actualized in absolutely another context, post-media one.
Bilous is not Morandi.
His "false tone" consists of red, blue, and yellow, and it is about blurred and digital optics of current info-modernity.
Blurred optics of digital modernity is under great suspicion.
Bilous' painting is stopped time after - or right in the moment - of new media' death.
Fixed by an artist's independent perception, this insane world (where artists and critics are the usual prostitutes) looses its euphoria, rather vice versa: it constantly consumes absurd pleasures of its own mortality.
Finally, wild fatigue after orgy, and "Appolonide" is post-orgiastic.
To conclude with, visual fixer in stopped time' regime allows author not to be involved into a false orgy of new media art with its blurred optics, and in the eternal emptiness (of Chukotka black sky) finally be succeed.
That is why black color of polar sky is an universal invisible dimension in series of "Appolonide".
Оleh Оlenev