Life of art after the death of painting: Mykola Bilous case
The painting of Mykola Bilous is a life after death. Postmodernists announced the death of painting many years ago. In the series "Appolonide," the human world is dying, being totally deepened into various sins. Artist's position is from the outside of the sinful world of insane humans. His art is a post-media one, due to the fact that it is after the end of cinema. Dziga Vertov's "Cameraman" (1929) used investigations of the history of visual culture, and after nearly a century painting takes revanche, providing stop motions of different situations from the brothel. In stop motion of time, there is an eternal life of Art. Bilous is a visioner, an artist, who turns off formal artistic conventions.
The outstanding position of Bilous painting in Ukrainian contemporary art lays also in his own aphoristic conception of the history of visual art. Here it is. First, classical Chinese art. Plain in complex, and complex in plain. Principle of laconic expression. Second, Eugene Delacroix. Color as a compositional element, Liberty Leading the People (1830). Third, Marcel Duchamp. Context of artistic expression, Fountain (1917).
However, the artist used Giorgio Morandi's "basic tone", who added black color to other basic colors, which were red, blue, and yellow, along with the revolutionary experience of Fernand Leger, who liberated color from shape. In Bilous' case, color from shape was liberated not by the neon shining of the Times Square commercials, but by the black sky of polar Chukotka. The artist was working as an industrial designer there, trying to achieve classical Chinese black-white monochrome minimalism, but it was really hard for him to overcome the overwhelming realm of the blackened polar sky. Honoring the victory over the blackened sky square emptiness, also as a vital element of the composition, pure black color is used to fill in all gaps in Bilous' painting series. In "Appolonide," and this is new in the artist's conception of color, white color is also vital, emphasizing the festival dresses of hetaira. That was said, Morandi's "basic tone" is re-actualized in absolutely another context, a post-media one. Bilous is not Morandi. His "basic tone" consists of red, blue, and yellow, and it is about blurred and digital optics of current highly digitalized modernity. Blurred optics of info modernity is under great suspicion.
Bilous' painting is stopped time after — or, rather just in the moment — after long ago time announced the death of the new media art. Fixed by an artist's independent perception, this insane world, where artists and critics are ordinary prostitutes, loses its euphoria — constantly consuming nonsense pleasures of its own mortality. Wild fatigue after the orgy, "Appolonide" is a post-orgiastic one. The last thing said here, the visual fixer in the stopped time mode allows the author not to be involved in a false orgy of new media art with its pre-intentionally blurred optics, and in the eternal emptiness of Chukotka black sky — succeed, after all. These are the reasons the black color of the polar sky is a universal invisible air dimension in the series of "Appolonide".
