When the universal Budnikov starts playing with the substance it is hard to foresee the consequences. For even if this substance is a piece of rusty iron, it is hardly about reality. Taking a step away from figurative or picturesque landscapes the artist returns to form, though the transformation in consciousness is obvious. Whatever Budnikov creates - with canvas, cardboard or iron, the form itself only provides him with an occasion for experiment with the inner nature of things, reflected in the rhythmic composition of abstract figures. Only touching upon the human world, they convey a completely different reality - a world of «space consciousness», that brought Kazimir Malevich to paint the Black Square, after which, according to witnesses, he could neither eat, nor sleep, until he found an explanation for it in his own theory.

To create a new composition of figures, Budnikov takes an arche-form from the ocean of space consciousness, that in combining of physical bodies give an unexpected result. We observe a Landscape, in which substance is a signifier of universal categories. The square shape reveals the Earth space, where ropes draw trajectories of Wings' movements - a series of vertical sculptures that turn the sky over the art-center's terrace into into a battlefield with their flat broken lines. Spectors of the underground, dressed in rusty armor, ready to get off the ground at any moment, yet, clinging to the surface, relying on feet...

The horizontal base of the sculptures seems reliable. Though approaching its light almost weightless structure becomes visible - a pipe, where emptiness inside is ephemerality, and its round shape is perfection of a musical instrument, whose sounds take you up. The skies and the firmness of the ground «turn upside down» in this construction, where heavy and weightless, horizontal and vertical, physical and spiritual dispose of their permanent positions.

In the primitive people's ideas of the shape of the Earth, recreated in the square with ropes, such construction would foretell the Apocalypse. Though in Budnikov's world everything is in its place: round Earth is swimming in space ether, and earthly vs heavenly opposition is easily resolved in the Landscape. In the dismissed opposition the hard vertical figure and its weightless base balance each other, giving equilibrium to all the sculpture. As if before creating it Budnikov meditated on Hermes Trismegistus's words: «What is the above is from the below and the below is from the above».

Olena Iegorushkina