Huge bright expressive canvases of Max Vityk cycle "Hallucinations in Zasupoyivka". Petro Gonchar (director of Ivan Gonchar's museum) called his work the most interesting of all gallery exhibits.
Газета "Україна молода", Цирк від contemporary art: http://www.umoloda.kiev.ua/number/1974/164/70262/
Vityk – 2011, Or the Return of Painting
Veni, vidi: Vityk.
Abracadabra: Painting’s returning! Magical painting.He came to Kyiv God knows from where – from Texas, theysay – and soon began to paint. His start was such that all the wagon drivers took notice – and the father Silvashy and the son Zhyvotkov. But what painting? He pours the paint like Pollock. He throws the canvas on the floor with broad brushstrokes over it. He pours the paint straight out of the can using sticksor twigs – whatever comes to hand. He vibrates as if spellbound through witchcraft. He can paint all day; all night; day and night. If only there was time. “I’m inside the painting,” said Jackson. There, inside, in the whirlpool of his lines and paints, contours appear. “My mommy bought me a horse.” Ukrainian by birth, Vityk’s genes are at play, as if in the middle of a jazz cascade someone suddenly started playing the flute. The wave of color carries further, and the contour. A storyteller. He cannot remain in an abstract stream. His brother, Kooning, answers him.
The American connections are made not because Vityk came from America. It’s just that his entire oeuvre – big, powerful, restive – is like the Great American Dream itself. In the 1930s, young Pollocks and Koonings roamed the streets of New York not knowing what or how to paint, but they already felt the world needed something big. After the war, everything reached its closure (Miss Guggenheim closed them), and then the volcano of American Abstract Expressionism began erupting – the great paintings that changed the world. And aren’t these the same 1930s again? We wander around waiting for something real. We’re so tired of that same fin desiecle; of that plastic post-modern. And the post-post. How much longer can we live through a hyphen, inside parentheses? We’re not at the end, but at the beginning. Of a new century,a new culture. So let’s live without parentheses!
And Vityk is the one who delivers precisely that. This might be because: a) he came to art from geology, dragging no painters’ workshop chains behind him; b) when he looks at a mountain, he doesn’t see its top, but the forces that created it. Exhausted by post-technological procedures, now we need strength! Looking at just one stroke by the savage Vityk, and you’re on your way to a cure. It was in this way that those who were tired of academism looked upon the young, savage fauvists: Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain. Those savages dreamt of capturing in one stroke all of the youthful vigor of life that was all but bursting from them. Today, it’s bursting again. Follow a Vityk stroke. It is lava erupting. You see a flower along the way – and the flower bursts onto the canvas, trembling. The mountain Kosiv appears, and so does the gentle “Kosiv”, with all the colors of the Ukrainian summer coming through. He might have longed for it in America. And what’s the result? Quivering life. There is no dull reality, but a riot of energy. There is a rich and harmonious musical chord. Vityk’s flower is like the symbol “ff”: fortissimo. And these are not the only flowers in the city’s labyrinths. “Transformers” is one of the most powerful and at the same time most frightening of his last series. It is a Munch’s screamtorn mouth, multicolored exploding eyes, a body in a “postmegapolis” contortion. The body consists of horrible pieces of flesh, which the artist bends and breaks before our eyes.The pieces can be rearranged, as with Transformers. No matter how you change them, they still give you the feeling of being bent and broken.
Does Vityk want to paint like this? Maybe he doesn’t. Flowers are more pleasant, but all the same those Transformers crawl in from somewhere. The painter is like a sponge and absorbs everything around him. And maybe that is the sense of his life – he is an indicator, a litmus paper. On the verbal level things are so-so, but under the surface, it all but misshapes you. It occurred to me why billionaires spend millions of dollars to buy the works of Francis Bacon, that grand master of contortions. It may be because they, like no one else, know the other side of the moon.
Nevertheless, place Bacon side-by-side with the most terrifying Transformers by Vityk. Bacon is a dead end from which there is no escape, while with Vityk something impatiently aliveis trying to force its way out. God forbid, this is not an attempt to compare the two talents, it’s just that Bacon is the end of the dry straw, while Vityk is budding snowdrops at their beginning.
The snowdrops’ color is surprisingly pure. Our geologist seems to have a natural gift for sensing color. As far as I remember, his senior colleague, “Kyiv’s leading painter” Tiberiy Silvashy would distinguish between artists and painters – those who had this gift.
And what is color? It’s the energy of condensation. For us pale sprouts of the new century, we need that energy like the long-awaited sun. Color; filled with life – it is also our national archetype. When you roam the museums and galleries of Europe, what catches the eye? There is no color. “The color in this country is such, that they should give alcoholic beverages out for free,” Brecht once said about his native Germany. We have both the alcohol and the color. It is probably no coincidence that when Vityk came from America he befriended Kryvolap. Kryvolap is a true maniac of pure color, undiluted by compromising mixtures. Vityk even bought a country home next to those of Kryvolap and Silvashy in the enchanting Zasupoevka. There they paint at the lakeside: the Ukrainian Barbizon.
The world has longed for someone sitting by the side of a lake painting, not devising a strategy how to sell oneself for a million, or for a hundred million, but simply painting. Like Peter Doig somewhere on his Caribbean lakesides. It was no coincidence that Lenin-Saatchi declared “the return of painting.”
Oleksiy Tytarenko
Video. Kyiv's Art Critic Oleksyi Tytarenko on Max Vityk's art:
