Petro Bevza’s penetration in the dynamic pointlessness

— Diana Klochko

As to painting there is a term rarely used in our cultural spaciousness – “penetration”. This is a partial synonym of much more usual “vision”. This term is frequently interpreted with some sexual connotations as “suffusion”. But sometimes it is recollected that there is a wider meaning of such uncommon in general (and especially nowadays) intellectual property as “discernment”. 

For me it is that the most important experience, which I get every time seeing Petro Bevza’s paintings.

To be clear, there are the processes at the physiological level:

Firstly, the pupils reflexively expand and the eyeballs begin to speed up the movement.

Secondly, the hands strive to touch the surface and often to plunge into the picture.

Thirdly, there is the deep longing to impose a silence, that’s why all sounds step aside from your consciousness.

This is the sensual occupation. The power of the colorful chord does not block the rationality, but always predominates as over the guessing of the difficult subject, as over the reminiscence regarding characters and over the objectivity as the part of Adam’s speech (he gave the first names to all things, but not to their qualities). I cannot say that Petro Bevza’s painting is another contemporary manifestation of turning to pointlessness, which became apparent in XX century.    

When color separated from the object and began to live its own intellectual life (like “Malevych- Kandynskyi-Rotko-Pollock-Silvashi” link), it was mainly local, abstract or expressionistic, but always unnatural. The urban design development, life in the artificial environment, where there is the necessity of even stronger visual incentive/impressions. However Bevza’s coloring prevailing over the objectivity and linearity always is the part of the natural surroundings, the environment of contemporary human, who cannot already perceive natural phenomena without correlating them with their representation on the art pieces. Current viewer has already experienced the art images’ invasion in his consciousness, so that he enrolls his visual acquisitions to the new esthetic feelings.    

When we look at Bevza’s irises, we see van Gogh’s landscape rampage rather than Dürer’s  aquarelles. Both Gauguin and Sarian could not aim at this task. Petro shows, how several lightings at once ooze out of the oils’ streams and layers. His coloring reproduces not only tonal correlation’s brightness, but the difference of carrying light movement. That’s why the darkest fragments (like in “Crucifix” or “Domus”) also join this game, although it does not shade the light (most of impressionists explain the contrast in this way), but give it another intensity. Something of that kind is going on in mosaic’s smalt: the color shines both in each fragment and streams above them, exceeds the bounds of different mosaic “pixels”, creating by viewers eyes’ overhead.             

The electronic metaphor is not a mistake in this context, because it is enrooted in the image of the surroundings of the current human, who considers the monitor’s light more usual than candle’s, which the mosaics, frescos and most of pieces were observed by up to the beginning of the XX century. The light’s intensity in the Bevza’s pieces is stipulated by the new light environment, when most of contemporary pieces and art objects in the galleries and museum exhibitions are observed by the artificial (electronic) light. However painting (especially nonfigurative art), where the electronic light’s “penetration” came about, changes into painting perceiving through different gadgets’ monitors. Human eye can evolve through the screen as well. The XXI century artist uses such oils that Turner did not have, but creates such color combinations that have apparent’s digitalization experience beyond him.       

Petro Bevza prefers creating his projects’ catalogues by himself. 

It is not important, if it is the series of images of fountains, angels with “finger”, pilgrims, crosses or hills. The intrigue will include even next predominating color – emerald, strontium, indigo or raspberry – and how will artist demonstrate to the viewers the game between them, the space and the light.

Petro Bevza’s “Penetration” into different exhibition spaces of different cities also becomes the export of the principle of the coloristic-spatial performance.  Like the scenographer of his own coloristic drama the artist propose always new expositions of his pictures, penetrating in the new spaces and filling them with not just separate pictures with a plot, but the coloristic vision. 

The Petro Bevza’s “discernment” becomes the version of the new authorial expositional practice. As well as modernists created the pictures cycles (Matisse’s “Odalisques”, Picasso’s visual analysis concerning Velasquez and Delacroix), Bevza creates the “out-of-plot series” advancing to the new dynamic objectivenessless.