Bazil Duliskovich: Selected Works

About

‘If I could put the message of my art into words then I wouldn’t be painting. I’d just say it — but I can’t, because I don’t think it’s possible to express my artistic purpose with words.’

Bazil has experimented with video art, collage and sculpture, but his principal means of expression is painting, a medium through which he challenges the Soviet art education he encountered growing up on the Ukrainian side of the border with Hungary. Another source of Bazil’s defiance is the ill-defined and stereotyping labels often applied to his work. Characterisations such as ‘Eastern European’, ‘Slavic’ or ‘post-Soviet art’ are a source of frustration to the artist, who grew up speaking multiple languages in a region endowed with numerous cultures and identities.

For this exhibition, the artist and the gallery bring together 14 of his latest works, with themes ranging from human and ethereal figures to flowers and utopian landscapes. Subjects are depicted using a unique method, similar to collages. This involves painting and cutting up several sheets of paper into little pieces, which are then mounted together forming objects and figures, creating multiple shades, and colorisations, similar to if someone was using pieces of bark to construct a tree. These tightly composed and complex works are, in their draughtsmanship, a product of the formal training Bazil holds, yet there is a conscious departure from the Old Masters and Socialist realism of the academy, even if stylistic traces remain. At first glance his figures can appear realistic — even photorealistic — but soon dissolve into a dream-like, cinematic visual world.

In Bazil’s experience, viewers interpret his paintings differently from the way he sees them, frequently pointing out a sense of loneliness suffusing the work. He rarely begins with a set plan in mind, and does not set out to capture a mood of isolation — nor is he comfortable providing ideological interpretations. But it is true that he prefers complete solitude in the studio, his own autonomous space. Although he can take weeks or months to finish a canvas, Bazil has also experimented with rapid art-making: in the series Daily Routine, he completed a painting a day, building a coherent body of work — a diary that couldn’t be put into words.