In his third personal project in Ya Gallery Andrij Dudchenko reflects upon a theme that directly projects his own experience for the first time. Though according to the artist himself, this exhibition is an address to a young person: “This is a person that is on the verge of important life decisions. He (or she) is hesitant, but also possesses a call for action."

Still it is easy to see the author's silhouette behind this hypothetical collective “Self", and as often in Dudchenko's works – the irony is directed not only at his own emotions, but at his formal decisions. Therefore, painted collage logically intervenes into the calm series of iconographic symbols.

A point of balance, that must put everything in its place, looms somewhere among the anonymous figures of the “adult world" and chaotic emissions of a youthful mind. Yet while the process goes on the artist continues his aesthetic game with the fragments of his own personality veiled in symbols. The central one is the “empty" head – prerequisite of the transitional period.

It is not without reason that the first analogy to Dudchenko's characters is Malevich's faceless peasants (late 1920s – early 1930s). Suprematist icon that asserted the metaphysical “desert of of nothingness" arguably stronger that the “Black Square" itself and caused terror in the existentialists with its borderline conciseness.

On the other hand, behind the faceless figures, we observe the image of Golem – a medieval mythical giant, created out of clay to protect the Jews of Prague. The polysemous symbol of apathetic force, a real one, but uncontrolled, and thus terrifying. In his starting positions Golem is Adam's direct “descendant", but unlike the latter, he doesn't go through the stage of self-realization, remaining only a symbol of the empty form.

Dudchenko broadens the gallery of faceless images, adding the issue of gender and time and space identification, without which acquiring one's own “face" is impossible. So in the end, experiments with formal and literary quoting of the artist pursue only one aim – to encourage the hypothetical “young person" to “reexamine their priorities and values gained in the process of socialization, to make a conscious rediscovery of the foundation of their own personality" (Andrij Dudchenko).

Olena Yegorushkina