Ivaniv Viktor

The paintings of the famous Ukrainian artist Viktor Ivaniv are distinguished by professional and spiritual maturity. He is a very diverse artist, with a wide creative range - from realism, to the avant-garde. Victor Ivaniv uses all the possibilities of artistic materials and graphic visual techniques, without stopping in his searches, and with each painting surprising more and more.

We see paintings written in relief expressive strokes, and they impress with their emotionality and sensuality, as well as geometric abstractions built on the interaction of lines and color planes, proportional relationships of the elements of the composition. And the fact that the artist's paintings are characterized by the actualization of color, compositional completeness and laconism, harmony of content and form, many art critics write. The artist strives for such a stylistic minimalization, "laconicity", when the main thing, the intimate, that he wanted to convey to the viewer crystallizes.

Victor Ivaniv especially displayed his philosophy and vision of the world in a unique and iconic series "Old Ukrainian village houses". From painting to painting - it is a recognizable corner of Ukrainian nature with a house, but with different sound, mood, coloristic decision. What unites them all is the stylistics that generalizes trees, stacks, clouds in some oval or rounded geometric forms, completely smooth, having a soft volume and casting clear long shadows on a smooth bare earth. The house and the whole world have the same rounded outlines. This idyll, multiplied by the calmness and light emanating from everywhere on the canvas. Pure bright colors, generalizing composite solutions also create this harmony, the orderliness of the world.

When you look at these and a number of other paintings, you understand why the artist tends to laconism, to abstract generalization. He paints with art language a certain formula of eternity, the greatness of the universe in all manifestations of life - from a bouquet of flowers on a table, to a lunar sonata - that spills over the sky and earth.

A surprisingly diverse artist - art historians on the example of his paintings could write half a dozen treatises on trends in art and their antagonism. But in Victor's paintings there is no conflict between qualitative realism and frank avant-garde.

Sometimes artists, in order to show off their skills before the "art band", rush from style to style. Here, they say, how clever we are: with my left hand - Dali, right - Kandinsky, with my foot - Raphael. Victor Ivaniv paintings are absolutely sincerely in any style, the conjuncture is not his specialization.

Idealistic landscapes with old Ukrainian village houses, a nonexistent world, but for some reason so close and native. Maybe he's somewhere there - in sweet children's dreams or on Mars? Maybe our immortal ancestors live there, glancing anxiously at the red sky - whether the industrial destroyers of their patriarchal-happy paradise are flying from the Earth.

Viktor Ivaniv is in constant creative tension, searching for various formal means of expressing his ideas, or rather, such colors, shapes, lines, and texture that would accurately express the state of his soul at the time of creativity. It is interesting for him to constantly open a new in himself and in the possibilities of art.

As a student of the Academy of Arts, he showed a desire for creative independence, an informal attitude to the chosen art, an aspiration to comprehend the sacrament of painting. His graduation work, "Shchedry Vechir", which was remembered by many, demonstrated professional and spiritual maturity, impressed with the boldness of compositional and colorful solutions. This work set the vector of creative path for years to come.

The deep - not superficial - the patriotism, the attraction to its own national culture and, at the same time, the sharpened individualism of a truly modern artist led to the emergence of a series of paintings, united under the general name "Old Ukrainian village houses".

Viktor Ivaniv has no paintings painted without feelings. The emotional nature of the artist pulsates in the picturesque surfaces of his paintings, in harmonious and spiritualized images. They fill the living space with positive energy, which places his work in an obvious opposition to postmodernism. But Viktor Ivaniv does not compete with anyone and does not argue. He simply creates his "own" art, faithful to the voice of his own soul.