Petro Lebedynets is the creator of forms and the painter of colour.
Everybody who, with the obstinacy of a zombie, prophesies death to the painting happens to see a rainbow, an intensely blue sky over their head, the greenness of meadows and the blossom of gardens that amaze with the inventiveness of Him Who created all this. Colours of the world speak to the artist, demanding incarnations and reincarnations of nature’s essence in artistic forms. The artist progresses from depicting the outward to profound reflections that make his spirituality evident.
“The Divine light, divided into colours, can lead to the first beginning – to the Divine unity, to the shining whiteness of the Logos,” wrote Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite as long ago as the times of early Christianity.
Inspiration, divine ecstasy! The artist enters into this state and keeps himself in it in the times of colour-painting, in contacts with the colour as an independent element. Everything done by Petro Lebedynets is the substantiation of the independence of life of the colour. It is intonation, not innovation that is the goal of his search.
Nature has bestowed upon the artist capabilities of inner enlightenment, spiritual inspiration and concerted (almost Zen-Buddhist) observation. One-hundred-percent capability to extract himself from the world of material essences, to dissolve into colour combinations, into reflections for colour and light, is God’s gift that the artist enjoys. Petro Lebedynets’s abstract compositions impress with their heuristic nature. As an inventive expert of composition the artist is nearing nears the inexhaustible combination capabilities of a great chess player. Has anyone calculated the potential of chessboard for variety? Petro Lebedynets’s painting, his work is a constant incarnation of physically existent paint as a materially present entity into poetic-and-musical quintessence. The artist’s thinking in images, as happens with every true poet, is being realised by means of a form – of qualities of the substance solely capable of embodying such thinking.
He is interested in the play of shades of a single colour, sometimes just barely enlivened by the intrusion of additional combinations, just as he is similarly interested in developing tone correlations, the resonance of colour spots, the play between the warm and the cold. It is a futile case to translate artistic element into verbal forms because you will always stay beyond the boundary. But you will confidently insist on the fact that the artist’s will opposes destructive self-annihilation of artistic nihilism.
The author delicately reflects changes in his own soul orchestra, he heeds the music, which is being born in him all the time and which requires to be manifest in colour. Every emotional movement in this outwardly restrained personality finds new colour combinations and as yet untried means for the depicting variations of states and moods. Erotic impressions occupy not the last place in Lebedynets’s Dionysusesque ways, in his cultivation of beauty.
“Light” and “shining”, combined, create a special space of compositions, so that it seems that the canvas is shining from inside.
It is very rarely that you encounter such a merger of sensuality of the painter of colour with rationality of a sober expert in composition. Every work is based upon rational discipline, a balanced calculation of a composition’s structure. These foundations of a future work of art provoke crystallographic associations. So, beneath the impressionist appearance of his canvases lives the ascetic nature of construction. Its function is to keep the further emotional recklessness, multiple layers of features, countless colour combinations within the boundaries of compositional harmony.
During the initial phases of painting the paints from palette or even from the tube are being transferred to canvas and speak to the author himself with the professional lack of compromise. The energy of colour “epithets” and the way it is put onto the canvas are somewhat frightening. Then the magic starts, lengthy loving “conversations-embraces” with shades, half-shades, with most delicate lasierung. And then the most delicate “mantilla” of valeurs is eclipsing the blossom of the “ABC” of colours – the melody of lyrical singing of colour combinations is burgeoning. Within one emotional symphony the author combines almost brutal force and tenderness, which, by the protuberances of the sensual elevate the viewer to something undeveloped but desired within him.
Paints, their everlasting play. If your senses don’t become confused as a result of watching colouristic harmonies worthy of the polyphony of Sebastian Bach or the melodic combinations of Vivaldi try and find the best in your soul within the impressionism of Lebedynets, in this colour-music. The Sun’s fragments, its bubbles, the waves of the painting field subordinated to the sensual infatuation of the artist are the beginning from whose symbols everyone will compose their own Text, everyone will find childhood with its joy and happiness of amazement.
It is impossible to imagine that you can become accustomed or indifferent to Petro Lebedynets’s canvases. “Stereotypes of the established” don’t work here because features of these canvases are miraculous. This is matter in motion, magic, it seems, transferred to the canvas by superhuman force and divine ability to create. We know that this is the labour of a man but we do not feel this. This painting is free, capricious, as if disorderly. Surfaces swell, get mixed, they boil, they shimmer with delicate changes, they emerge as mysterious zones, hillocks, dales, the features are as if created according to the laws of crystal-like essences and volcano eruptions. This is almost a natural phenomenon, not skill. Such is the labour of Creation of Petro Lebedynets; the depths of the maestro’s mind are a water-well while his inventiveness is like limitless landscape. The union of the artist’s soul and his painting imagination created a special Universe. As is characteristic of the Universe, it is capable of expanding and returning to the scale of a human being who meets you at the threshold of the atelier with a gentle smile.
Olha Petrova
Artist, Art Critic, Extra Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, Academician
