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Yuriy Koval
One step ahead
The artistic practice of the painter Yuriy Koval is undoubtedly anthropocentric. The drama of the artist’s paintings is gradually unfolding: around the image of a person, through the portrayal of the body and its fragments, portraits and self-portraits, placed into different subject environments; as the story of observation and self-immersion, arguments about the integrity and harmony, conflict and destruction, the outline of zones of influence and comfort. Physicality in works of Koval acts not only as an aesthetic factor, but as a universal code, as an emphasis on the importance and vulnerability, the fragility of human life in general and the significance of each individual, their fears, aspirations, desires, taboos.
Just as a body can simultaneously symbolize defenselessness and strength, the artist builds his compositions on contrasts that increase the tension of a picturesque dance, he combines monochrome and warm nude colors, sharp angles of two-dimensional planes with soft and smooth volumes, a tumultuous object movements with a frozen void background.
By collaging objects, the author creates a kind of theatrical entourage, dramatic and sometimes absurd, but one that reflects the paradox of the world and the variety of circumstances that a person faces throughout life. The naturalistic depiction gives robots an eerie persuasiveness, immersing in contrasting unions of incompatible. In today’s intensive flow of information, different realities overlap, and it becomes almost impossible to distinguish real and fictitious, to find where exactly the reality benchmark actually is. The flow of disassembled shots in the works of Koval is like a flicker of images in the mind, which we encounter every day, and the information background, which inevitably affects everyone.
In his hyper-realistic paintings, Koval speaks of the body as a territory, as an alive space that has certain outlines and characteristics – with strengths and weaknesses, painful spots, injuries. Space can be common, controversial, open or isolated, with fixed or moving boundaries. Your own body is the only area the contours of which are safely outlined. But even this border is blurred and fragile. The outlines of the body are the visible physical boundaries of the inner, sacred, and private space. Its movements are expansion into the surrounding space, its appropriacy, permanent establishment, and destruction of territorial boundaries.
Natalia Matsenko
