Petro LEBEDYNETS
Master of Artistic
Enlightenment and Revelation
About a century ago Paul Klee, the outstanding Swiss avantgardist, remarked in his Creative Confession (Schopferische Konfession, 1920) that
«…genuine art does not only reproduce the visible, but also makes the secretly perceived invisible…»
Decades later a leading representative of the non-figurative school of modern art in Ukraine, the gifted painter Petro Lebedynets, has lent weight to the truth of Klee’s thought and made it relevant to the beginning of XXI century. Lebedynets takes the viewer inside his artistic enlightenment and revelations, which are masterfully transformed into abstract compositions. He reveals his subjective vision of Spirituality, an unreachable world superior to Time and Reality.
His paintings are bright with the feeling of frantic, almost cosmic, yet conquered energy. Lebedynets creates his emotionally-tensed and sensationally-dynamic masterpieces, penetrated with inner fire, with the help of intensive and loud strikes of color. Consciously «sacrificing» any subject form, the author creates a single rule of shining color and gleaming light, shining in the flat space of his cheerful paintings. The wide strokes which turn magically into streams of light and color do not presuppose the use of contours. His easily interpenetrating color surfaces create the feeling of vibrant motion.
The author considers color to be the sole element of his paintings. It replaces picture, volume, perspective, chiaroscuro. Color is everything for him. It is color that gives Lebedynets’ paintings an absolutely constructive and, indeed, cosmic significance.
Like other abstractionists (or abstractivists: abstract, abstractive art – Fr. «abstractivisme», Lat. «abstractio» – distraction) Petrо consciously avoids any associations with the reality of everyday life and rejects any pictorial plot, believing that art should exist independently of the visual world.
The bowl of colors and resolute texture in Petro’s distracted and large (sometimes up to 10-15 square metres) diptychs and triptychs do not prevent the author from creating a paradoxical compositional integrity and color harmony, which delight and astound the viewer. Being a child of the Azov Sea coast, Lebedynets is always dreaming of the summer and longing for the sea. In his paintings the artist often uses his favorite colors, the ones stored up in his inner space from early childhood: the emerald of the waves, the turquoise of the southern sky, the blue of the summer night, dissolved in a palette of sultry orange, hot purple, burning ochroid tints. He treats them like the musical sounds that create challenging yet harmonious chords of dabs on surfaces.
His masterly use of multi-layered strokes demonstrates Lebedynets’ wonderful skill in handling colors. Although he avoids the basis of realistic art – the three-dimensional illusory picture he, nevertheless, consistently adheres to the traditional technique of oil painting that defines a thorough and perfect work on canvas.
The author is mostly concerned with color and the textural surface of the canvases. The paintings of Lebedynets, lost in expressive power, with their bright sculpture-like fluid forms, their soft twinkling of rich colorful layers pulsing with tension have a monumental quality which creates the feeling of a complex sophistication and exquisiteness of composition. He is concerned with both the proportions and the balance of color and shape as well as using color as a metaphor for the human perception of the world and attitudes.
Thus the picturesque illusions and fantasies of Lebe-dynets can be perceived as ‘aedoses’ which can be translated from Greek as «visible images of certain frames of mind». Through the free play of his imagination he is constantly seeking abstract visual images which can express his various emotional states. Nevertheless, the excitement of inspiration and intellectual discovery experienced by an artist, who is sensitive to all the manifestations of the external world, are easily perceived in his works.
Paul Klee appears to have been right about another issue: in 1931 he wrote «… the more terrible the world becomes, the more abstract the art becomes…»
Nowadays when many Contemporary Art masters create paintings expressing fear and dismay, Lebedynets avoids dramatic color combinations (his recent works contain almost no black color). So the positive image of his cheerful paintings remains undamaged, creating a special charm which attracts the viewer. We have a right to admire the marvelous fullness of light in his works.
The artist considers that one of his aims is to express the feelings and impressions generated by Divine light and color, allowing artistic intuition to be his principle guide in this spiritual search.
It has taken some time for Petro Lebedynets to develop his unique style. Actually, already at the end of 80’s having gained a traditional academic education and graduated from the Kyiv State Art Institute (known today as National Fine Arts and Architecture Academy) he was by that time far from indifferent to the modern artistic innovations and started looking for another system of visual art. Gradually he moved in the direction of improvisatory and dynamic art, resulting in his ‘leap into abstraction’ (by V. Kandinsky).
As Lebedynets grappled with the problem of pictorial art, he was able to make his first real stand when he discovered Paul Gauguin with his incredibly decorative style, based on the flat spots of color and stressed contours. It was Gauguin who «discharged» the paintings of Lebedynets from the custody of traditional ‘stage’ space.
In the 90’s Lebedynets was fond of Classic Moder-nism uppermost the ‘geometric abstraction’ and the most it’s most sophisticated trend – ‘neoplasticism’, the system of which was set by ‘De Stijl’ group in Holland (1917-1923) headed by Pit Mondrian and Teo van Dusburg. But Lebedynets found the French ‘neoplastic harmonies’ of Nicola de Stalle (1914-1955) and ‘colorist constructions’ of Serge Poliakov (1900-1969) (an artists of Russian origin) to be the closest to his liking. It was probably under their influence that Lebedynets developed his own artistic style. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian artist has undoubtedly genetically inherited a craving for saturated colors, which are characteristic of traditional Ukrainian icon painting, and basic to the geometric pattern of Ukrainian plakhta and ornament of
national tapestry.
You cannot ignore the association between the color and flashes of light in the paintings of Lebedynets and energetic tension of the abstract space of Vasilyi Kandinsky’s (1866-1944) works. It may be inaccurate to say that Kandinsky had a direct influence on Lebedynets, but there is some coincidence in their attitudes towards dealing with the problems that their artistic work throw up. The global master, pioneer of both Russian and European abstraction, V. Kandinsky, mostly uses definitions like: completeness, harmony, composition and Lebedynets has fully adopted these. In spite of the seemingly impetuous style, Petro’s compositions are distinctly well-ordered in terms of succession and methodical in terms of their composition.
It should be noted that the expressive color scope in the Kyiv non-figurative school does not correlate with the powerful ‘abstract expressionism’, also called ‘the New York school’ or ‘painting of action’ (1946): this was the first movement of genuine abstract art in USA, which first appeared in New York (let’s remember that the term ‘abstract expressionism’, used in Berlin in 1919 was caught up in 1929 and used to refer to the first abstract compositions by V. Kandinsky). Work of many outstanding Paris artists, like Mondrian, Lege, Masson, Ernst, Breton, Matta, Seligman, Dali, who were looking for the ark of refuge in New York during the World War II, became an important factor in the revival of this movement in 1942-1959.
As a matter of fact, the Ukrainian artist Petro Lebedynets has managed to breathe new life into the traditions of European non-figurative art at the turn of the XXI century.
«I am experimenting all the time, but in the system of painting harmony and not destruction. Any image reflects the energy that the author puts into the painting. If the author introduces positive emotions, then the influence of the painting will also be positive. The viewer’s mood is improved, her imagination stimulated, her creative skills encouraged to develop. So the viewers themselves become involved in the creative process, » – states Lebedynets.
That is the reason for him to work constantly, preser-ving the fundamentals of painting like Harmony, Color, Texture and the spiritual and emotional principles, related to them, so as to stimulate the circulation of positive creative energy. By virtue of this the paintings of the extraordinary Ukrainian artist, Petro Lebedynets, which shine with the beauty of the master’s dreams and his spiritual search, have a magnetic, hypnotic power which energize the viewer and facilitate a genuine catharsis.
Zoya Chegusova
The scientific employee of Rylsky Institute of art studies, folklore and ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine,
Honored Art Critic of Ukraine,
Shevchenko National Prize-Winner of Ukraine