КОНТАКТИ

Taras Wozniak

 

 

 

Forest made of stone by Peter Humeniuc

 

 

 

One-story buildings sleep like exhausted animals,

geographers draw stars with chalk on the sky map,

in the red glow of the rain lanterns drops like winged sand,

and the moon with a golden cat lies on my couch.

 

Dead fish rust in pools, coal and black roses,

merchants and naked girls, prisoners in prisons and poets.

The orchestra of policemen blows melancholy into trumpets and horns,

when the bourgeois god counts the stars, souls and coins.

 

Whales, dolphins and newts live under the city, as in fairy tales

in thick and black as tar, water, in terrible cellars a hundred,

ghostly ferns, vultures and flooded comets and bells.

"Oh, a stone's throw when a new flood sweeps you away?»

Bogdan-Igor Antonych. Trumpets of the last day,

 

May 1, 1936

 

 

 

To understand the meaning of the painting of the Lviv cult artist Petro Humeniuc (1957), it is necessary to enter, or more precisely - to return to the contexts in which the master appeared and created. Today we are approaching the first quarter of the 21st century. In the time after the First and Second World Wars, we have experienced a lot of artistic revolutions. Why do I go back to such seemingly distant events of the twentieth century, which seem to have faded away, trying to find an existing interpretation of the work of a contemporary Lviv artist? And because, in my opinion, his work has been and continues to be nourished by sources from that turbulent century. And the word "beat" is decisive here.

They are surprisingly alive, not cut down, not exhausted.

 

You will be surprised, but trying to understand the ethos of Peter Humeniuc's work, I was surprised by his social roles. Yes, they are social. What is the ethics here, when we try to understand the aesthetic values ​​of the work of this artist - you ask. After all, painting is, above all, aesthetic in all its manifestations - even in the perverse - you say. So. But not completely. At the end of the nineteenth century, tired of the exhausted moralizing of academic art, artists went to the other extreme - trying to create art devoid of any social function - and thus trying to abstract from morality and its rigors - binding norms.No, they did not fall into immorality, but simply reduced it to zero. However, the horrors of the two world wars reminded us that the abyss of terror is near - that it is between us and even, according to Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905-1980), "inside us".

 

Someone set out to moralize, to passionately assert their rigor, as it turned out - perverts, ethics - such as communists or Nazis.

 

Someone by inertia continued to rest on his apparent impartiality. In the end, they completed the trajectory of their amorality in postmodernism, which devalued any, not only ethical or social attitude of the artist to absolute zero - "everything is equal to everything, and everything does not matter, because all values ​​are not only equal but also equal. levels of zero ". .Ideally, this should be the perfect postulate of the postmodern. But such a postulate would require the same exhausted people. Instead, people are as they are. And it doesn't matter how insensitive or a-moral, out-of-moral, out-of-social they want to appear.

 

An abyss of terror breathed into everyone's face. She is waiting for every turn of human life. For him every moment.

 

Therefore, there can really be no position from the point of view of an abstract person who is not involved in the living flesh of life. We are all in contexts and with our own inseparable stories.

 

Petro Humeniuc, an artist and dissident, has the same contexts and history.

If we talk about contexts, in order to understand the meaning of his work, we must start with the fact that he and his twin brother Andriy were born in the family of grandfather Mykola Humeniuc, soldier of the Ukrainian Galician Army, father of Oles-Dmytro Humenyuk (1925-2020) soldier Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Gulag prisoner, participant in the Norilsk Prisoners' Uprising of 1953. Here is a typical story of a Galician intellectual. But she, no doubt, creates the context - grandson and son can not help but follow the same path.

 

 

 

However, in the days of Brezhnev's deaf timelessness, protest and even struggle took other forms. Including artistic.

At that time, Soviet socialization was everywhere - any career or just life had to be invested in the Procrustean lodge of official socialization. There could be no other art than the boring Soviet-Stalinist socialist realism. Therefore, protest and dissent went into underground literature, art, even farce - underground was traded not only for "forbidden" jeans, but also for forbidden literature, music, modern art. Many have forgotten about it. And most of them already seem to know nothing about the peculiarities of the cultural landscape in which the creative personality of Petro Humeniuc developed and worked, and all of us who come from the cold, still very Stalinist 1950s.Times go by… And maybe that's good. However, it is necessary to remember - at least in order to appreciate the ranks of those people who arose and created in those frozen times…

 

One of them, of course, had to be Petro Humeniuc - he had to, because he had such a family background - and he had to, He studied with underground artists of the 1960s - Ivan Ostafiychuk (1940), Volodymyr Loboda (1943), Danylo Dovbushinsky (1924), Volodymyr Ignatenko (1940).

 

And, of course, like all of us then, in those distant 1970s / 1980s he learned what had been lost in view of the Stalinist freeze of the 1930s and 1960s. It froze deep. Thawing, and partly with regular repeated frosts, really began in the 1960s. But even in the 1970s and 1980s, the protest was still very relevant.

 

And such a protest took place in the Lviv art underground, which had several centers. Of course, there were the "schools" of Roman Selsky (1903-1990) and Margita Reich-Selska (1900-1980), Karl Zvirynsky (1923-1997), the "esoteric club" of Alexander Aksinin (1949-1985), but there was a whole archipelago of creative workshops:because he could not fit into the nausea of ​​the official "art" of that time.

 

It was quite late, because after serving in the army, in 1984 he graduated from the Lviv Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts. And he finds himself in an environment that still remembers pre-war Lviv. The environments are personified - in particular, just a monument to the pre-war Ukrainian Lviv Vira Sventsitska (1913-1991).

He studied with underground artists of the 1960s - Ivan Ostafiychuk (1940), Volodymyr Loboda (1943), Danylo Dovbushinsky (1924), Volodymyr Ignatenko (1940).

 

And, of course, like all of us then, in those distant 1970s / 1980s he learned what had been lost in view of the Stalinist freeze of the 1930s and 1960s. It froze deep. Thawing, and partly with regular repeated frosts, really began in the 1960s. But even in the 1970s and 1980s, the protest was still very relevant.

 

And such a protest took place in the Lviv art underground, which had several centers. Of course, there were the "schools" of Roman Selsky (1903-1990) and Margita Reich-Selska (1900-1980), Karl Zvirynsky (1923-1997), the "esoteric club" of Alexander Aksinin (1949-1985), but there was a whole archipelago of creative workshops:Andriy Sagaidakovsky (1957), Myroslav Yagoda (1957–2018), Vlodko Kaufman (1957), Yurko Koch (1958), Igor Podolchak (1962), Igor Klekh's “Masonic” stained glass workshop (1952) and Hryhoriy Komsky (1950). Artistic slums were seething - where is our Styx-Poltva. And also Peter Humeniuk's worker, undoubtedly ...

 

Petro Humeniuc began to look for his creative method, feeding on two seemingly incompatible sources.