Maksym Mazur

The works presented were created over the past few years as the result of a creative search based on the transformation of visual images, symbols, signs, and objects into an abstract, sensuous form beyond the traditional, non-objective worldview perception. The artist has consciously abandoned classical painting materials in favor of experimenting with objects, seeking to utilize their inherent potential. By purifying the readymade with color from excessive informativeness, the artist achieves visual expressiveness, distancing himself from producing illusory reality, and instead presents the works as elements of that very reality. The painterly objects become part of the gallery space, interact with one another, and generate discourse. The artist’s dialectical visual language balances between the material’s physicality and its intellectual form, provoking the viewer toward perceptual, metaphysical cognition and their synthesis.

Interacting with the space of the Institute of Automation (DNVK KIA, Kyiv), the artist grants a second life to the attributes of the scientific environment that have lost their utilitarian function in the process of shaping a new historical field. Texts, diagrams, posters, explanatory notes, and employees’ notebooks, as fragments of the past, have become incomprehensible, unreadable, and obsolete in the contemporary world. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the artist overcomes the notion of decline as well as the notion of progress. He resurrects fragments of meaningless text by turning to the technique of assemblage which, in the words of its inventor Jean Dubuffet, “cleanses civilization from the waste of human activity and becomes material for creating works of art.”

Departing from “pictureness” as depiction, the artist delves into texture, surface, color, form, and the plasticity of the object, stripping it of concrete representation until its original objecthood is completely lost, and demands the thematization of the creative process as the final result. The hermeneutic circle narrows to the method of transliteration — one that essentially transfers text from one graphic system into another. Originating at the end of the 19th century, this method became the foundation for the standard of translating non-Latin scripts into Latin while preserving the letter form of a toponym. This made it possible to include works written in other languages into a unified catalog and strengthened international connections. In a manner similar to the principle of transliteration, the artist attempts to transform the obsolete function of a book as a text for reading into an object for contemplation. Textual language becomes the material of a visual, abstract language. The continuous process of layering words, paint, and time is captured in an unbroken video sequence. The allegory of accelerated video reflects the speeding-up of global time and the transformations associated with it, illustrated by the example of the redevelopment of the Institute of Automation’s technical facility into an artistic center. There, in one of its hundreds of rooms, hides the workshop of Maksym, where he personally prepares paints — from pastel to aggressive colors — to satisfy, through his own mixed technique, the phenomenological needs of humanity. Thus, in the artist’s objects, text becomes color, and color becomes language.

The wind irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

(Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”). 

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Text - Natalia Lisova

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