Dnipropetrovsk. Ya Gallery Art Center

The Eighth Day

Oleksandr Korol

02.06.2016 – 19.08.2016

Oleksandr Korol

Biblical subjects traditionally are the most interpreted ones, so this time Oleksandr Korol makes his contribution with a project The Eighth Day. For the artist this stage of creation of the world becomes a symbol of contemporaneity. The author fills the epoch which mankind are currently living in with concepts of religion and science, social standards and principles of Weltanschauung.

Exhibition Dnipropetrovsk Ya Gallery Art Center

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

Author

Oleksandr Korol was born in 1974, lives and works in Dnipropetrovsk.

In 1995 he graduated from Yevgeny Vuchetich State Art School, and in 2004 - from Ukrainian Academy of Printing in Lviv.

"With the exception of single cases when Oleksandr Korol lets himself dive into the pure abstraction, his works are populated by various creatures: from easily recognizable, but childishly, primitively stylized, to touching, unprotected, extraterrestrial (in meditative graphical or collage sheets of paper) and finally - fantasy, unreal, malformed and even horrifying. The painter may create a cozy circle marked with a theme of childhood and unexpectedly, like a child that tries to overstep the limits of permitted, - runs into the uncontrolled adult world with its fears and dangers. But there are more game and interest in this process: things transmitted from life into the plane surface stop scaring you."