Biblical subjects traditionally are the most interpreted ones, so this time Oleksandr Korol makes his contribution with a project The Eighth Day. This stage of creation of the world becomes the author's symbol of contemporaneity. A certain contradiction between a well-known belief that the eighth day goes after the Last Judgement and Korol's perception adds extra meaning to ideological basis of the exhibition.
The author fills the epoch which mankind are currently living in with concepts of religion and science, social standards and principles of Weltanschauung. Artistic exploration of the present time becomes tightly connected with a human personality. It isn't directly described, rather a research is focused on common discourses. Every single artwork is full of a large number of semantic symbols, whose position corresponds with a textual structure, -- and we can read Korol's works indeed. Thus, a whole set of Christian and pagan issues, which belong to the rite of exorcism, reveals this notion only in their totality. Contemporaneity as the eighth day consists of separate, mosaic fragments: a puzzle-like image of Christ; a metaphor of the science that is shown as a figure of Nikola Tesla; the Old Testament story about the eighth plague of Egypt, and its plot is easy to understand through the artist's work; themes of violence and choice that become more concrete in forms of kidnapping and a battle accordingly. However, the biggest semantic explosion is found in The Creation of Adam installation where divine is an integral part of demonic, and human is narrowed to popularization. Modern and postmodern art practices speak especially loud, dictatorially overlay Michelangelo's classical art form, and hyperbolize the initial message.
“The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure." - as Giorgio Agamben wrote to comprehend a notion of relationship between a human and time. So we see that Oleksandr Korol refers to substances of the Eighth Day's darkness and this way he enters a specific, very close co-existence with contemporary period. Nevertheless, the author's point of view doesn't condemn, it's rather filled with sympathy for processes that take place in simultaneously endless and short-term substance that is called “today".
Polina Limina