Biography
Dmytro Demianovych Svechnikov (Born 1957, Khorol village, Primorsky Krai, USSR) is a painter, graphic artist.
Studied at the Poltava Art School.
1978 – Graduated from the Kharkiv State Art College.
From 1978 – Participant in regional, national, all-union, and international exhibitions.
1986 – Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
Lives and works in Poltava.
A representative of the Ukrainian New Wave. He works in the genres of thematic composition, landscape, and portrait across various stylistic directions. He employs expressive techniques and heavy impasto painting, which gives his works a distinct materiality and texture. Svechnikov is an author of original, technically accomplished works. The artist is drawn to the vast possibilities of easel painting. His artistic creed centers on versatility, multi-layered narrative, and multifaceted stylistic and semantic depth.
A testament to this is his canvas Return [Povernennya] (oil on canvas, 1989, acquired for the Sumy Regional art Museum collection from the artist in 1990). The painting depicts an architectural structure whose concrete framework is executed in a dark, restrained color palette. Through thick corner pillars and openings with upper beams, a panoramic landscape unfolds, where a transparent sky with clouds appears beyond the endless horizon. Rising through the openings are enigmatic structures resembling posts covered in black drapery. These may represent human figures or their conditional-symbolic embodiments—likely a spiritual rather than physical manifestation.
The canvas offers no answer to any question regarding “return.” Quo vadis? (Where are we going?). Where are we returning to? We return back, into the past… And this is a movement that brings no relief.
In the canvas, the artist’s “city” is a lifeless, dead urban environment devoid of human presence. It feels like a perception that is crumbling and falling apart. The remaining architecture is unstable, as if frozen in time and space, vanishing right before one’s eyes. The work is painted with thick, heavy, painterly strokes, predominantly in gray-black and brown tones. Svechnikov restricts his palette, reducing it to a near-total dominance of dark shades with minor inclusions of varied nuances designed to delineate the relief formed by the heavy oil paint. Through this tactile texture, chosen palette, and distinct stylistic traits featuring modernist tendencies, the artist seeks to construct an emotionally measured, philosophical dialogue with the viewer.
