Icons \ Ideals

Marco Grassi (IT), Marinda Vandenheede (BE), Misha Alekseenko (UA), Serhiy Popov (UA).

Contemporary non-objective and reductive artists create their works using limited set of visual categories such as a line, a shape, a color, a plane, an object, a space, emptiness etc. Like letters in the alphabet, these visual categories have their own universal abstract images - representations used by artists as visual elements in their imagination. 

Picking an element or a combination of them, an artist develops an original configuration (a concept) in compliance with the original idea or based on a sense, on intuition. Using that configuration, an artist aims at achieving a certain state that resonates from perception of an artwork as a coherent image: the sense of harmony. This aesthetic sense emerges when the original idea complies with the artwork that by virtue of its harmony and authenticity has an existence of its own. 

An idea (a concept) developed in a space of abstract images-representations and harmony achieved by an artist stand before viewers as «silent» experience: observation of an artwork through vision alone rather than by reading it. It is impossible to read it using a “language”. 

With no bridge of linguistic instructions, visible and perceivable images get imprinted in the viewer's conscience and exist there as concrete icons — eidoses. Being abstract and minimalistic, an eidos as a visual representation is open to games of imagination: it can become an ideal or a prototype for new concrete icons, can be embodied in a certain idea or get a shape in something else. 

Losing its integrity, any concrete thing breaks down into abstractions — icons for the future ideals.

Serhiy Popov

2018

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