STATEMENT

FROM COSMOLOGY OF AVANT-GUARDE TO COSMOGONY OF MEGAART

The Art of Memory

The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia and my childhood were inseparable. It was mandatory to subscribe to the Encyclopaedia by the Stalinist’s government for the soviet officials in the post war Russia .My father was one of them and soon after the death of my mother, he dumped fifty volumes of the Encyclopaedia and a myself, then just a baby, in my granny’s cottage and left for the city to make a career in the Justice system. For many years those fifty heavy volumes, full of coloured images under semitransparent paper, replaced the absence of children’s books and toys. They defined the nature of my approach to creativity which mostly depends on the written word from dictionaries and encyclopaedias. This allows me to abstract the inspiration from the whole history of human thought; from the Euclidean atomic theories to the present philosophy of complexity.

Rediscovery of Vitebsk

There was no Modern Art in the Encyclopaedia Sovetica. For decades Modern Art had been a state secret in that country and it was a real cultural shock for us, the young artists, when previously unseen art appeared in museums, libraries and cinemas during the Thaw; the first liberalization of political and cultural lives in the USSR. The other shocking thing that I discovered was that I was living near to Vitebsk; a small provincial town in Belarus where M. Chagall was born, where K. Malevich taught his theories and where the aesthetic revolution of the world’s importance took place.

The Cosmic Consciousness

The catalysts of my artistic development were a number of sources; Ancient and Modern modes of Symbolic Wisdom traditionally presented through Sacred Art, Philosophy, Magic and particularly those thinkers and artists thoughts and practice that can be described as a representation of the cosmic consciousness; from the anthropomorphic vision of Plato’s Universe to the living Cosmos of Mark Aurelius, from Marsilio Fissino terrestrial Magic ‘to Jordano Bruno’s s Great Aanimal- Universe, from the Russian Avant-Guard Cosmology to P. Mondrian’s theory of Universal Beauty.

The Zone

I called my first compositions Zones. I had been working on them deep underground for almost twenty years because only in secrecy could I survive as an artist at that time in that country. Those canvases were the only place where I could ignore the then current, weird, political and social life. Only there did I felt free to experiment and work on the creation of a Spiritual Universe inside a Closed System.


The Game

The “Glass Bead Game” by German novelist Hermann Hesse, first published in 1946, was a major inspiring provocation. The sound of those scattered beads, their kaleidoscopic combination of shapes and forms became for me a visual translation of the “Conceptual Game which integrates all Fields of Human and Cosmic Knowledge through forms of Organic Symbolism’’

The Play

Combinatory Play (as defined by A. Einstein in 1945) seems to be the essential feature in productive thought’’ This is an extraordinary method to generate ideas. It allows one to reshape and reconstruct. To fragment and to transform. Combining ideas dramatically and geometrically increases the complexity of a system and changes our perception and nature of interactions. Endless dynamics. new combinations for new futuristic possibilities. It doesn’t matter what the system is made of as long as its parts and their interactions yield intelligent behaviour overall.

The Structure

“The 21nd Century will be a century of Complexity” as quoted by Steven Hawkins. For decades flatness dominated the abstract Art of the 20th century. Pretending to be a computer and playing with 3-D, I wanted to add some volume to Kandinsky’s forms and shapes and to the spots and splashes of Pollock’s works. My curiosity has been rewarded with unexpected, growing, chaotic, self developing structures which demanded a certain level of complexity before coming to the state of balance.

The Divine

In ancient Indian thought, the goal of human existence tends to involve Escape from Time
Intuition, Curiosity and Metaphysical ambitions brought me to the conclusion that Art and Philosophy could express the same content – The Divine. After the cosmology of the Avant-Garde, the only logical way to add my contribution was cosmogony- to look out to the other side of our physical reality.
Using metaphor as a language, a sense of humour as a tool, imagination as a magic wand, I arrived eventually to visualize the Divine World of “After Physics,” as defined by Aristotle. The Divine Laboratory, where new Universes are being created, the Divine Kitchen- where new primordial soups are being cooked from the new primordial ingredients.

Valera Martynchik