Information about the work
The artist deliberately leaves his works untitled, believing that any word limits their meaning. The collection of the Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum features three multi-sized works titled Composition [Kompozytsiya] (oil on canvas, 1986), acquired from the artist in 1992. The abstract work presented in the exhibition is characteristic of his oeuvre from the second half of the 1980s and 1990s.
Art critic Taras Voznyak writes in the catalog for Bazhaj’s 2019 solo exhibition: “The artistic activity of Vasyl Bazhaj during the mid-1980s and late 1990s was linked by many critics to post-structuralist philosophy, and to some extent, this is accurate. For Bazhaj, the concepts of painting, installation, performance, and art in general are primarily constructed phenomena, with so-called ‘behavior’ and objects relegated to the background. That is why he willingly uses the concepts of figure rather than body, texture rather than spot, form rather than image in his works. For a figure has a structure, whereas a body is imaginary; texture possesses specific properties, whereas a spot is amorphous; form has clear contours, whereas an image is mostly associative and multi-variant.”
On a canvas of an ecological “earth tones” palette, one can trace an engagement with spatial dimensions. The artist seems to construct an exhibition inside the artwork itself out of three planes set at different angles, mirroring the experimental approach he utilized during his solo exhibitions. Geometric and amorphous color forms do not compete with one another, but rather contrast and complement each other. Bazhaj’s abstraction eloquently testifies to a bold and consistent development of the artistic ideas of his teacher, Karlo Zvirynskyi—from formal to semantic ones. The semi-abstract objects in Zvirynskyi’s metaphysical space lose their remaining traces of reality in Bazhaj’s work.
In the words of American abstract artist Mark Rothko, “Flat forms destroy illusion and reveal truth.” The truth of the spiritual dimension in Bazhaj’s work is humanized, filled with emotional anxiety and a sense of inevitable loss accompanying any choice made during the arduous process of creation—for in choosing one thing, the opportunity to attain another is lost.
Oil on canvas. 110 × 100
