Victor Sydorenko /   Sydorenko Victor Dmitrievich

December 28, 2014

Milja Ficpatrik

Ok, I know it's so damn corny to quote somebody just to describe yourself, let alone Confucius, but this quote says all about my relationship with Widewalls, so forgive me for doing this: Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. Am I forgiven?

Victor Sydorenko is a Ukrainian painter, curator, teacher, an author of objects and photocompositions and also scientific and publicist. Since 1997 he is the member and the vice-president of Ukrainian Academy of Arts.

Victor was born in Taldy-Kurgan, Kazakhstan, then part of the USSR, in the family subjected to repression by Joseph Stalin’s regime. At the age of 8 he took an interest in the painting, at the age of 10 – in the photography.

After completing his secondary education and doing his military service Sydorenko entered Kharkov Art-Industrial Institute (the Kharkov State Academy of Design and Arts) from which in 1979 he graduated with the degree with distinction. The student of the professor, the winner of The USSR State Prize, B.Kosarev, in 1981 he became the post-graduate student of the creative workshops of the Art School of the USSR.

Victor Sydorenko is one of leaders of Modern Ukrainian Art. Victor’s pathway from realism to neoavant-gardism is first of all a tribute to the full freedom of creativity of the last generation that grown and was working at a totalitarian regime. Time, Memory and History are the central idea of the project, which extrapolated their polyvariance and different readings into the language of visual images and construction. Such specific realities of our time as the memory problems, a heritage of post totalitarian rudiments, the questions of identification of the person in the modern world which is becoming more and more complicated, the prospects of the person in new globalised model of life-construction, enter into the sphere of creative interests of the artist. Besides, the research orientation of its creativity also concerns the past, but with underlined de-ideologized relation to a cultural heritage, with the use of possibilities of an arsenal of new media.

From the moment of creation of the project “Amnesia” (1995) the idea of «the renewal in memory of fragments of the past» will not leave Victor Sidorenko’s creative consciousness and every following project will be constructed on the basis of the concrete experience of the childhood, adolescence, youth.

The totalitarianism theme in its any forms and displays becomes the object of research of the Sydorenko in the project «Ritual dances» (1997). The author considers it as the global phenomenon of the ideological un-freedom, whether a political mode, whether sectarianism, religious dictatorship in which everything is directed on absorption of the person not only in spiritual way, but also in physical one. The project excludes any spatial and time concreteness and it is deprived of reflexions concerning the Soviet past. Its main task is to display the especial sensation of a paroxysm, crisis and spiritual degradation which are present at consciousness of the person living in the totalitarian validity.

With his project “Millstones of Time”, kept in neoclassic trend he created an outstanding, multilayered work, which special feature is its work in process. This becomes obvious in its ability to gain different modifications depending from concrete exhibition space without losing its main concept, as well as in presupposed consistent flexibility of perception of all its media components. This supports the fair thesis that the integrity of optics of the “current moment” is rather the totality of fragments understood in the process, in movement of feelings and modeled by thinking, imagination, nostalgically seeking the unity and coherency.

The searches of own identity in social collective are finished by the triumph of the unification. This is how the artist suggests deciphering the word-hybrid taken out in the name of an exposition of “Authentification” (2006). Victor Sydorenko does not stop here: the mechanism which is put in action and is generating metaphors, forces the author to make out a mummification prototype in a banal hairstyle. This triumph of a body looks like the transformation of a trunk into a perform for the plaster dummy which will definitively replace the person in society is cast. Only this dummy still has a chance to survive and find immortality.

In the project “Levitation” (2008–2009), the artist gives an advantage to the optical illusive game which is created by dense and viscous red color and by the space with large-format picturesque planes and installation. Man’s figures stretched out and soaring in air, are forcing to lose reference points and coordinates, and even yourself.