Crystallism

ARTIST'S MANIFESTO

THE BARRIER TO ENTRY

"There is the secret sense in the world"

by Vladimir Sorokin.

"Mythology is not largely a stadial phenomenon, but extra-historical, atemporal, permanent one. Another thing is that there are epochs which reveal the mythological attitude to the world more and epochs which reveal such attitude less”,

Nostalgia for origins (introduction) by Mircea Eliade.

“The opinion that myths and ideas about the gods being creations of a primitive man and the myth-creating power disappearing in the course of a‘ progressive culture’ of the soul, is a scientific prejudice. The truth is exactly opposite... The ability to fill one’s world with gestalt, shapes and symbols marked by a single character belongs not to the primitive era, but exclusively to the early periods of great cultures”,

Oswald Spengler.  

"A man in search of his soul"

by Carl Gustav Jung.

VANISHING POINT

This term refers to a point on the horizon of visibility where all lines converge. This definition, and the phenomenon itself, describes remarkably the creative stage of my life as an artist: scattered thoughts about the form and content of my paintings, the faint feeling that the “message” broadcast by me has determined a stylistic, genre form, everything, all the way to etymology and the lexical meaning of the word itself denoting the direction of my painting - all the elements have formed into one. Like particles uniting into crystal lattices.

RAPID EYE MOVEMENT

In the middle of the twentieth century two American scientists discovered and investigated one of the four phases of sleep - the phase of REM sleep and its connection with dreams. Participants of the experiments were allowed to sleep, but were not allowed to doze, which means they couldn't also dream. The next day people deprived of REM sleep felt depressed, nervous and irritable. When they were allowed to doze, people indulged in real "orgies of dreams" psychologically wishing to catch up on everything that had been lost the previous nights. The meaning of these experiments can hardly be underestimated, according to this context the most important thing is rightfully confirmation of a person’s organic need for a dream - which means the need for mythology!  

As a creator and artist, I was always preoccupied with thoughts about the connection between a man and the space, about human involvement in cosmic processes, about sacred knowledge, the path to which we are laying through mythology and symbol. These thoughts became the whales of my painting.

Present belongs to the Internet, technology and science. A person adapts to a high speed of flows of all kinds of information, bringing an unhurried deep analysis of existential phenomena of an external and internal nature as a sacrifice to the shallow scope of large volumes of knowledge of different quality. It would seem to be a victory of rational activity and conscious life over the old theological concepts, dogmas and institutes that are losing any significance.

I will take the liberty of asserting that it is an era of religious crisis; a time in which the “dialectics of the soul" is an archaic term and the "metoo" movement unites the continents.

A fleet glance at the shallow meanings - this verbal construction partially describes the relationship of  a modern man and the world of art. But the universe has a dual structure: shallow and deep, female and male, sacred and profane, collective and individual. One flows into another. And my innate sensitivity of perception suggests that the time of the profane is expiring. A deep striving for sources, for cosmic religion and sacredness, for a personal universe and myth-making awakens to life. And according to a philosopher and sophist Mircea Eliade, an artist, a creator is accustomed to the sacred space fuller and deeper, because the artist does not “use a myth, but also lives in it”.

RESONANCE OF CRYSTALS OR CRYSTALLISM AS A HERITAGE OF RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE

My creative method has been formed for several years in a completely natural way: “facetness” as an artistic technique was partly decorative in nature, as it seemed to me, having its origin in addiction to crystals and interest in such amazing properties as resonance. This physical phenomenon looks particularly impressive on the example of a crystal that enters into resonance with some musical harmonics and significantly enhances their sound. Or if you take a well-known experience with the resonance of a quartz crystal and multi-coloured balls: at the moment of their interaction, the mottled mass of balls begins to divide by colours, because each colour has its own resonance! It is amazing to observe how a spectator begins to resonate with a certain picture.

Over time, it became apparent that the choice of style was dictated from above as the only one that met my supertask and meta-message. To facet reality, refracting it in crystalline reflections, in order to accidently see a crack between the worlds and look into it without fear: see the hidden, comprehend cosmogony and find its beginning.

In 2018 I finally formulated my direction in painting, passed the vanishing point - “Crystallism” as I called it. And a little later I discovered (surprisingly, I discovered it only after I systematized my thoughts, put in order my creative path and determined my place in art) that in 2016 Grigory Ginsburg, an art critic, academician of the EANS, introduced the concept of “crystallism” as a new style in the definition of art. It turned out that in modern Russia, there is only one artist besides me who works in a similar style, it is Vasily Krotkov. Although it seems that only a certain coincidence of form is related, a kind of transformation of the “Rayonism” theory by Mikhail Larionov, one of the founders of the Russian avant-garde: “geometrizing of forms, searchlight chambers, refined and dynamic colouristics”. But still, as G.Ginsburg noted correctly crystallism "does not fit into the usual framework of such avant-garde movements as cubism, futurism or ... cubofuturism." His feature is an expressive palette, the integrity of forms and contours, as if they are placed inside the sparkling facets of the crystal: space inside space. The depicted is multiplied in itself. Faceted planes refract light beams and at the same time the viewer's perception of reality.

A crystal is a magic glass, looking into which you can see what a dense curtain of reality hides. The secret sense of this world.