The project includes works by famous Ukrainian artists Oleksiy Khoroshko and Serhiy Savchenko.
The works of both artists united by one theme – the existence of matter (material) in the process and the existence process in the matter.
The artist consciously chooses material (matter) to create their own images, but the process of creation leads to a balance of liberty and by natural essence of matter. Art work in all cases is the result of interaction between these two important concepts. Process and matter, rationalization and intuition, plan and case – lead to extensive understanding of the field the author and viewer.
Oleksiy Khoroshko experiments for many years and works in technique fumegraphy. This is a special author’s technique which basis is to investigate the properties of fire.
His works have drawn by fire. It traces the fire in a fantastic patterns arranged in mega-system signs and hints.
Serhiy Savchenko works in oil and acrylic painting. His monumental planes of oil emails and varnish united in the expressive mix and erupt in rapid volumetric texture verticals. Pure virgin white canvas area littered with intuitive drawings-simbols contrasting with the silhouette of colored spots of paint.
Space of trajectories fire lines and author plan of Oleksiy Khoroshko, painting layers of living and arabesque figures of Serhiy Savchenko lead recipient in infinitely wide interpretative field.
Innovations approach to content based on the fundamental traditions of the Ukrainianavant-garde in the context of European culture can talk about a new word in the world of intuitive conceptualism.

Marianne Popkins

Academic of Arts Center of Galician Contemporary Art

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The Catena Artistorum — litteraly the “chain of artists” — is an organization that was created in 2016 by a group of curators and collectors, spearheaded by the colorful and multifarious Xavier Gonzalez-Florenzano, from Barcelona. All of them, living in places as diverse as New York, Lviv, Berlin and Geneva, made a similar observation: what artists lack the most — more than diplomas and grants — is a community, a place where they can belong, where they feel inspired and renewed in their vocation. The great majority of artists balance their unstable financial situation with temporary jobs, which makes for long working days and little time to cultivate such relationships. Furthermore, artists are often at odds with “ordinary people”, somewhat alienated by the mysterious nature of art and the excruciating demands it can make on an individual. In response to this need, the Catena Artistorum wove together, like a large patchwork, the networks that its founding members had already grown in a variety of cultural hubs. This “weaving” is what the CatenArt Residencies are all about, bringing artists together for two weeks of fellowship, work, studio visits and reflection.

Since 2014, such residencies have been held on the French riviera, in Barcelona, and last year in Berlin. A growing number of Ukrainian artists became part of the movement, so much so that it was decided that the 2018 residency would happen on the Ukrainian soil. The residency unfolded in two times: five days in the countryside, focused on fellowship and work, and five days in the city, focused on studio and other cultural visits. As soon as they gathered in Lviv, on the morning of June 20th, the 21 participants hopped in a bus and headed to the Creative Residence located above Slavski. Surrounded by the majestic beauty of the Carpathian mountains, the bulk of their time was dedicated to studio work, each artist developing freely his or her own practice: performance, installation, painting, photography, poetry, sculpture… One theme ran through the residency: Transfiguration, that brief and mysterious moment when everyday reality becomes transparent to divine beauty. Long periods of work were punctuated by times of relaxation and celebration, from the best of Ukrainian foods and drinks to the rythms of traditionnal Hutsul music. By the time we had to pack up and head back to the city, the large and light-filled studio was filled with drawings, sculptures and prints, and it seemed we had known each other for months !

The residency, however, was far from being over. The second part of the residency, in Lviv, would culminate on Thursday, June the 29th, with the opening, at the Scenography Gallery, of the exhibition of some of the works created the week before in the mountains. Contemporary icons by Olena Smaha and Natalia Satsyk (Ukraine), a stairway to heaven by Nezihe Karakaya (Turkey), meditative installations by Mihaël and Teresa Barabash (Ukraine), a short video by Graham Livingstone (US) transporting the viewer into a fog of light on top of a high mountain, a massive, upside-down, limestone head by Volodya Semkiv (Ukraine)… The works testified to the wealth of talents and artistic languages present at the residency, but also to the climate of friendship and contemplation that presided to their creation.

The second part of the residency was also rich in memorable studio visits and cultural events. Natalia Satsyk and Olena Smaha proved us that the ancient tradition of iconography is still very much alive in Ukraine and that it has the ability to integrate the language of contemporary art and the longings of contemporary man. Serhyi Savchenko introduced them to his explosive creativity in his studio, where his legendary appetite for life meets his deep sense of conflict and tragedy. Natalia Polovinka, the celebrated vocalist, actress, and founder of the “Word and Voice” theater, honored us with an intimate peformance, where byzantine liturgy and traditionnal folk songs point towards the same, transcendental beauty. Moved to the core by the beauty we saw and heard, we were reminded that, in spite of our cultural and social differences, we have the same heart and the same, deeper longings.

These friendships often result in impromptu collaborations. Last September, Olena Smaha exhibited her contemporary icons, whose visual language finds such a meaningful echo in Romanesque frescoes and in the works of Antoni Tapiès, at the Pigment gallery in Barcelona. Peforming artist Yaryna Shumska (also from Ukraine) was invited by John-David Mooney (American artist who took part in the Barcelona residency) to stay and perform at his foundation in Chicago this year in November…

Our 2018 residency in Lviv proved once again that the Catena Artistorum meets a real need, the human need of the artists to be part of something greater, something inspiring and life-giving. It also manifested what an important gift Ukraine has to offer to the art world. This is a soil where contemporary art is still irrigated, as it used to be in the West, by the rich Eastern liturgical tradition. We look forward to disseminating this gift further, as the Catena Artistorum continues to weave its web of enduring friendships between artists of all countries and traditions. We are looking forward, in particular, to our 2019 residencies. In February 2019, the Catena Artistorum will meet in Berlin during the annual film festival, for a two-week long encounter on the theme of “Cinema and Identity”, offering a multimedia workshop as well as encounters with profesionnals of the “7th art”. Another CatenArt Residency will take place that year, in June, in New York City. Stay tuned to our website or shoot us an email for more information.

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Here is a small video-souvenir of the residency:

Catenart Lviv 2018

The post Lviv 2018 appeared first on Catena Artistorum.

Paul Evdokimov famously wrote that “abstract art originates from iconography, Islamic arabesques, and the transcendental.” If Malevich made this affinity clear enough, Olena Smaha gives us a fresh understanding of this connection while still holding on to the figurative dimension of icons. 

How can we follow the flow of tradition in a world that does not subscribe anymore to its codes? How can the eternal light that bathes the sacred figures reach down to us, when our daily lives are constantly bruised by gratuitous violence, as witnessed everyday in Ukraine, and recently too in Barcelona?

Olena’s icons are, from this point of view, deeply relevant. It is always tempting for an artist to reproduce the forms that made sense in the past, but Olena Smaha found the way to an authentic new language — and the word “language” is not used lightly, since an icon is written and not painted. Iconography is about writing the Word.

Even though the human figure is predominant in her icons, nothing is more foreign to Olena’s work than a fascination for the sensible nature of things. The written elements and the archetypical look of her figures remind us that the iconic similitude is always ruled by the hypostasis (the person) and its already-spiritualized body. Nudity, for instance, acquires here its full meaning, even though it is traditionally banned from the canons of sacred art. In reference to the Son of Man exposed to the crowd’s humiliations, the body recovers the sacramental meaning it had in its original innocence. Contemplated in this light, it acquires a symbolic dimension opening up to the person in its entirety.

A number of details, such as the rose-colored cheeks (betraying the inner workings of love) or the use of verbal icons, show how seriously the artist is committed to the ancient tradition of Slavic iconography, when Kiev was the heart of Russia. Luz was undoubtedly one of the most important works in the exhibition at Pigment Gallery. While its formal composition follows the canons of the most ancient representations of the Transfiguration, it is also, in a certain way, revolutionary. Indeed, the boldness of the characters’ depiction, the seemingly chaotic ballet of lines (sometimes bordering on “rough art”), the expressive contrasts and the overload of undecipherable graffiti pay homage to street art.

This aspect of Olena’s work is what most manifests her responsibility as an artist. If you look at the ancient icons kept in Lviv, you will see that common people often engraved their names on their golden background. These engravings are an expression of devotion, the freedom of love overcoming the distance imposed by the sacred. On their rugged piece of wood, devoid of any aesthetic self-indulgence or seduction, the figures seem to lean in our direction (they use the traditional “inverted perspective” of icons) with an inexpressible pain. The work of clarification is performed with such intense perfection that each image seems, at the same time, the expression of a cry and of a supernatural love.

The simultaneous perception of a suffering echoing in eternity and of an inviting tenderness construes the true meaning of salvation and beauty, even though the beauty at stake is a wounded beauty. The contemporary man, especially when he experiences suffering, can no longer be satisfied by the empty aesthetic, sweet or dry, of canonical rules and ideas. He needs a naked presence, in its simplicity, in its uncompromising message. He needs being. Love alone can offer this, as it brings together knowledge and adoration, word and silence, beyond the dead ends of power and utilitarianism, and endowing the sacred with its most urgent performative dimension.

Many artists use forms in order to achieve an aesthetic result attuned to their tastes or to the expectations of their time, but very few are those who open for us the deepest recesses of their soul. These are the ones who truly enable us to perceive the crux of our time. At this point in history, Olena’s works seem to prophesies the destruction of our world and its re-foundation in mercy.

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