Once in a while, there is an opportunity to view some artist's works from a different angle. There is a new series, a new work, a new detail which makes you take a backward look at all author's artworks: what if there is something that we haven't noticed before?
'I don't search for a plot – I search for the 'tone' and 'colour', and the rest will follow'
Susan Sontag
Once in a while, there is an opportunity to view some artist's works from a different angle. There is a new series, a new work, a new detail which makes you take a backward look at all author's artworks: what if there is something that we haven't noticed before?
Ihor Yanovych's exhibition Folder is a case in point. The works, mostly on A4 sheets, were created in 2008 when the painter took printer paper with him to the health centre in Truskavets. This material has become inalterable space for search and experiment from then on.
As of today, this type of Yanovych's works covers a whole decade. Painted at the desk, they were differed from the pictorial works of art considerably by the method of creation and material. The expressive composition rather than the texture of (often incompatible) substances was the field of search in this case. At first sight, the sheets look like draft sketches to large canvases but they do represent a completely independent project (very few of them turned into actual paintings). This way Folder always accompanies Yanovych's big series, from Horizontals to Trajectory, and allows changing essentially our focus of attention: what is the author's creative concept if we look at it through Folder?
In the foreword to Yanovych's book of the same title printed by the Artbook Publishing House [1], I compared Folder with Pablo Picasso's sketches to The Young Ladies of Avignon, Marcel Duchamp's The Green Box and Vincent van Gogh's correspondence with his brother. All these artefacts of art history had one thing in common – the status of an object of secondary meaning. They, nevertheless, opened the space for understanding the true dynamics of the modern culture. Each one of them explained in its own way the 'titular' works of the painters: in the form of essays, clarifying commentaries that expanded the interpretation of a work of art, sometimes in the form of theoretical considerations or a diary.
Folder is also a collection of attempts and revelations, an artistic autobiography. As a book, it provided a visual commentary to the painter's several years of work. As an exhibition project, Folder is the evidence that this path full of reflections does not end.
Borys Filonenko
[1] Ihor Yanovych. Folder – Kyiv: Artbook Publishing House, 2017. – 136 p.
