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OLEG SUSLENKO 

Face no more

The "Face no More" project is about how simple, actually, you can look at things. The artist is tired of wrestling with the romantic myth about the uniqueness of creation. Tired of looking for my own Self, confirming his uniqueness in front of "the face of eternity": otherwise, supposedly, a work is not entitled to exist. The myth of uniqueness is like a rake, on which we're stepping again and again, guided by something not even mental, but something that works on an organic level. It seems that all has long been decided, agreed on the fact that uniqueness is impossible, the face of art has become collective. The artist has two alternatives - to be in the trend, or not to be at all, he is forced to integrate into the system of recognizable. It can not exist autonomously, it can not generate ideas; the density of the information field that fills our brain is too large. It's been a long time since this information field has long been held, however, we need to live our life and creative cycle at once. Therefore, one has to put up with the fundamental uniqueness, while receiving pleasure from art - this is, perhaps, the only thing that doesn't come, in contrast, from the monotony of ideas. The painter paints his circles - this is not the next turn of "aesthetic reductionism". It's just reductionism. Simplicity, decorative character is a marker of a new abstraction. No theories of veiled harmony of world order, "music of spheres", "dictates of the subconscious", to wit, complex to simple. The old codes evaporated, everything is simply now and senseless by definition, and only this attempt to move away from the meaning in the direction of a pure non-unique form is the salvation ...

Victoria Burlaka


I'm so sick of the same one-to-one pictures, photographs, installations, performances and videos, that sometimes I want to close my eyes and not see it all. No, it's not true, I'm not sick of it. It's my work I'm tired of, because at first invent them, then I do it, then I look at them, then I take pictures, process it in a photoshop, publishing, and then they start to look at me from the monitor screen or from the wall, so I want to close my eyes and not see it all. No, wrong, the truth is that these days there's too many artists, all kinds, both bad and good ones. More artist than photographers. There are so many artists that if you sit down to work on the next piece, it turns out that somebody has already done it somewhere, or does it somewhere in this moment, let's say, in Thailand. Despite the fact, that we are all very different, in fact, we all think about the same thing. So, for example, there are thousands of works made in different corners of the world by different authors without prior arrangement, which are similar to each other as two drops of water. Even if you go into the idea of doing something totally senseless and ugly, it's possible, that it already exists somewhere, and most likely it is not senseless. You can try, for example, to type on the keyboard some random combination "c; wfvjn" or "dftng" and clog it in the search, and it turns out that it's no longer so random and has several thousand values, many of which have real content. Although, everyone knows that there are no two identical snowflakes, I doubt it very much.

In my ''Face No More'' project, I decided to close my eyes so I could not see what I was drawing. No, it's not true, but then I still open it and see everything well. I closed my eyes to simply increase the amount of odds in these works, in the hope that when removing the band, I will see something new, something untold. I wanted to increase the presence of a random, or better, subconscious. But the brain is so tough and strong gendarme, which learned to "see with hands." If at the beginning of the project I was really surprised by some compositional solutions, then, in the last works I already knew what was going to happen. Or maybe the truth is, that I'm just tired of hearing the phrase, "and I can draw it myself", "so and the child picks up", "everyone can do so". Yeah, yeah, I didn't see what I was drawing at all. And the colors that were in front of me in the cans was squeezed by Nastya. I have a rather primitive idea of color combinations, so I completely entrusted her.

On the works of the ''Face No More'' project, you can also see the circles. Every work is called "Blue Circles", "Green", etc. I suppose, everyone has already guessed, it's just for the beauty, or as it's fashionable to say now to attract attention. Because the attraction of attention will save the world.

Blue circles
80х200 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2010
Pink Circles
80х200 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2010
Gray circles
80х200 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2010
Green circles
80х200 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2010
White circles
80х200 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2010
Circles on the black
80х200 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2010
Deep blue circles
80х200 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2010
Circle
80х200 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2010
Black circles
200х160 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2011
"Face no more" in Institutskaya gallery
Kyiv, may 2011
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