Liliya Dobzhanska

Sculptor Oleg Pinchuk

T

he word sculptor attributed to Oleg Pinchuk is a capacious and extremely organic definition. Maybe because it is attributed not only to his creative work. He might as well be a strategist of General Staff, emissary of the UNO, or a PR professional. But it was his ability to sculpture his own self, adapt for himself the environment and conditions that predetermined his creative choice.
Any creative act is nothing else but materialization of the creator’s striving for the ideal. On the one hand, it is anybody’s – be it an artist, a scientist or a businessman – aspiration. However, the advantage of the artistic profession lies in the fact that while following this route, he leaves for permanent use the incarnation of his ideal. Thus, following the well-known Nekrasov formula, he sows "the wise, the kind, the eternal". On the other hand, this scheme works only on certain conditions: if the artist is a creator by nature, and if he is in demand during his lifetime.
Having burst into the patriarchal virgin land of the Ukrainian post-Soviet art, which inherited all the birth injuries of the new statehood, Pinchuk has laid on it one of the most noticeable furrows. He turned out to be a pioneer of the civilized art market in this country, showing by his own example a) that an artist can be prosperous; and b) what it is to be done to achieve this.

Queen

The discovery is by no way the revolutionary one. The recipe doesn’t require much wisdom, it is simple and clear: talent; professionalism; ability to generate ideas for the creation of one’s own myth. Talent... without one there wouldn’t be anything to speak about. Professionalism... the Soviet academic school, with all its system of drill, played its positive role in Pinchuk’s creative career. As to the myth – it works with the calculated precision any strategic rocket could envy. The secret of this myth lies not so much in external effects, but mainly in facts – as any serious proof. And the facts are, as they say, handy: Pinchuk’s works are today in demand both in Ukraine and far beyond its borders.
Oleg was born in a small ancient Ukrainian town. Some critics would have added "provincial", which wouldn’t be too far away from the truth. Pinchuk is from province. But he isn’t in the least ashamed of it. Lomonosov, as we all know, didn’t have a Moscow City dweller registration either. We all are from childhood by origin, and Pinchuk’s particular childhood originates from Drogobych. Its wooden churches, sluggish provincial tenor of life with its petty bourgeois elephants on the chest of drawers remain an invisible inner beacon for the sculptor. Behind the futuristic forms of his sculptures we can’t help seeing his attachment to tradition as well as peculiarities of his upbringing.
The word artist normally implies a definite philosophy of one’s creative work. That’s where the difference between a true artist and a craftsman lies. An artist is a philosopher mainly due to his peculiar relations with the world transformed by his imaginative perception. An image as the artist’s main thinking category is not simply an instrument to copy the objects of this world, but a method of coding one’s emotions, one’s know-how.

Bird, that lays golden eggs

However, there are just a few people, who, calling themselves artists, attain this level. Examples are not too far to find – there exists an entire generation of "professionals" disguising the lack of elementary knowledge of composition and anatomy by an intricate sophistry of conceptualism. In Pinchuk’s sculptures proportions are frequently and deliberately violated too. But to have the right to violate them one has to know them.
In his genesis Oleg went "from the inverse". He began to transform the objective and, alas, not always impartial reality being already loaded with sound academic background. Having Kiev Artistic Academy professor Vronsky’s studio studies as his first alma-mater, he also graduated from High School of Visual Arts in Geneva – artistic Oxford in a way. Being a student of outstanding European Master of Arts Michel Girshi he made a convincing discovery: Art is not a thing locked in itself. Developing upwards on the evolutionary spiral, operating with scientific categories and following universal economic laws, it is at the same time the ultimate absolute product, opening all the world history, its spiritual and, what is no less important, material experience to an artist.
No good is a soldier who doesn’t carry a marshal’s baton in his haversack. An artist, who doesn’t have the ambitions of Dali and Picasso, isn’t worth a brass farthing either. It’s just this rank Pinchuk keeps dressing to, considering artistic popularity one of the indispensable valuables of art. But, finally, having passed the road of paradox, he created his own doctrine, in which creation is primary to the reality. However, he takes it not from metaphysical abstractive speculations, but directly from life and habitat.
Irrespective of the habitat, however, the creator remains belonging to his people and places he is from. Mastering the unknown to the post-Soviet art technique of influencing the viewer became one of the most important experiences of Pinchuk’s "Swiss" biography. As for the motives of his creative activities, his nature has always been independent and ideologically "unacceptable". Having absorbed the total cosmopolitanism of the modern European art, Pinchuk still remains a Ukrainian artist. With all the "ethnographic" consequences, which follow. Each of his images is the result of individual transformations of objects of his whimsical world refracted by his childhood memories and hypodynamic reality unlimited by any national or state borders. With him the European correctness lives side by side in harmony with the Slav resourcefulness. As well as with the peculiar, sly and charming Ukrainian adventurism.

Happy Birthday

For the artist himself the word adventurism always carries a positive connotation. It’s a synonym of the word Game. However, there is a saying: in every joke there is only a tiny fraction of a joke. Calling himself for fun "the best Ukrainian sculptor of all times", Pinchuk kept his word.
The art in any epoch is not free from either the conceptualism or postmodernism. They, after Umberto Eco, emerge at the historic and philosophical arena when the society and civilization get to the dead end of their own evolution. In the sixties in France there was a rising tide of suicides. As a preventive measure a simple but at the same time original and even witty method was invented. In entrance halls of public transport stations the signs "No exit" were removed. Instead of them there appeared the other ones: "The exit is nearby". Pinchuk never calls anybody anywhere – he simply shows the way out of this dead end. Representing no definite school or direction in sculpture, he offers "a different system" of imaginative thinking – light, provoking the viewer for improvisation. Viewing the Game as the main principle of the aesthetic communication of his time, the sculptor absorbed it into his own creative temperament.
The Game determines the place of the artistic image in the Pinchuk’s life program. Each of his characters is partly a self-portrait, the features of which are as easily remembered as the stylistics of Monet or Van Gogh’s pictures. His characters are positive, kind and self-enamored in a good way, similar to the author himself. Being aware of the total tiredness from the conceptualism, which keeps stumbling over twisted joints of its own terminology, he brings the viewer back to warm, almost homely chamberness, where life is so comforting and pleasant.
It is by no chance that out of all the artistic forms he chose sculpture. Being comparatively less expressive, it gives by far more "concrete" way of accomplishing artistic tasks. Sculpture, like a sculptor himself, being of some physical weight and volume, is more real in space and time. And consequently it has more chance of "getting through" to the viewer’s consciousness and sub-consciousness.
The choice of the material, – bronze – isn’t accidental either. The natural properties of bronze are known to work for the creation of a tangible image. However, Pinchuk’s first sculptural masterpiece was a wooden eagle, traditionally manufactured in the Lvov region. Honestly speaking, his eagle looked more like a crow. This double likeness later became a distinctive feature of his characters. Bulls with fish fins, fishes with human faces... they have very much in common with a sculptural folk toy characterized by humanization of animals. Further more, still closer and nearer to the childhood of humanity – to the imaginativeness of the antique world, where the distance from an animal to a man, from the man to God, from God to legend, and from the legend to reality is but a small step from here.
The real in his works can’t be separated from the fantastic. But, despite mysticism and polyphony, Pinchuk’s sculptures are earthly, warm just as Decameron characters.
Thus, Pinchuk-the paradox restores one of the most amazing paradoxes of art – the perception of a masterpiece, when the effect of emotional empathy, being a cornerstone of art in general, is possible without either the historic context or the literary "plot".

The Kangaroo bird with a baby

One of the distinctive features of Pinchuk’s brand name is a frequently used pendant element, creating a feeling of live vibration. Catching his characters unaware in the phase of keeping the balance, along the sides the author places dialectal oppositions, perpetually aspiring to the unity. The very soul, "after Jung", is located at the point of their intersection.
If nothing human is alien to Pinchuk’s characters, so much it is so to the author himself. One of the critics determined his anthropomorphic "cacti" as "erotic florism". However, Pinchuk’s eroticism is also ironic and full of fun. He is playful and mythological at the same time.
In Pinchuk’s Games with form and volume one may find the roots of his own, created by himself, mythology. However, Pinchuk’s play is, as Englishmen say, a fair play – a gentlemanly play, with an open face and open cards. And even if there is a notorious "ace in the sleeve" – so then this is the personality of the artist himself, which is as incomprehensible as God’s Providence, which brings his hands into motion.