Born free, a human being seeks freedom all their life, looking for it within and without the limits of fate, circumstances, stereotypes, their own body. This is the biggest existential paradox and, at the same time, the simplest answer to all life questions. The human thought is the last shelter of freedom, its speculative form. Spontaneous and chaotic, it sets the flight in an indefinite direction until it finds its embodiment or is dissolved in the air.
Art as a possibility of freedom is forever marked by its paradoxicality. The history of art is the history of an artist who stands on the edge of an abyss. They want to jump and fly, plunge into the infinite air flow, but all the freedom gives them when pushing them down is the soft landing on a new edge where they are going to stand as long as they did before waiting for a new push.
When working on his Flight. Fragment project, Volodymyr Budnikov understands that the flight is wide of the conceptions of freedom. To fly like a bird is to become similar to a bird bycasting off the human body shackles and voluntarily confining oneself in bird's ones. Icarus eventually got lost in sea waves, and Letatlin never took off. What if freedom is anti-flight? Refusing from the bird's logic in favor of the thought's logic, a way to support art and freedom itself? The act of creation for Budinkov is the story with an open ending. The reality that an author will face when done with a work of art is unknown. The artist's flight is the right to move without destination – just as the thought does.
The form as the fixation of an idea is the main obstacle for the free art. The illusion that freedom bestowed on creators always put new formal constraints on them. Every new art revolution gave rise to hundreds of epigones as well as thousands of outsiders that could not obtain the status of an artist because they were unwilling to recognize the epoch-established form. Volodymyr Budnikov, despite the limited space of a canvass and the monochrome palette, makes a radical turn towards the idea, eliminating the form as certainty and destination, breaking it down into small elements, turning it back towards the movement, towards the process of thought formation.
The artist's logic unwrappingitself in the exposition is to change the context and proclaim the possibility of the other flight. Denying the engineering accuracy of Tatlin's object of 'intimate aviation,' Budnikov generalizes the technical elements of planes and contours of their wings, leaving the process of deconstruction invisible to the viewer's eye. All we will see here and now is the birth of the new reality that the author did not envisage – the true reality of freedom of the human thought.
Marina Bogush