CO2
A new project of Sergii Chaika, a young Ternopil painter, is not his first one dedicated to the war theme. The description of war has become a way of revealing social pathologies. He draws brutally, with grotesque, without striving to satisfy someone's taste. This time the painter pushes off from earth at all, and there, right in the rarified atmosphere, where carbon rules, depicts German pilots - insolent, masculine as if halfdrunnk because of this height.
"CO2 - is a cycle of works made of reaction pieces, actions, landscapes. The weightlessness. It is actually possible to twist and turn everything. The dynamics of composition. Mtion. Diagonals, diagonals. The colour is reserved (even very reserved). It's minimalised in details, the principal attention is to create the spirits, atmosphere of the World War II, flight, heaviness (with all the easiness, grayness of the main colour). History is the mechanism, that opens new (wider) opportunities in the reading of works. The plain falls down(flies).Since my childhood it has always impressed me with its frame, so black, frierful, with crosses. The crosses are enough to create the mood but not more. The minimum of narration. The torn finger. "Urinating" - so cosmonautic, with a flying hand (Heil - Germ.).I wanted to create blotto spirits. The lips. What are they doing? They are definitely not smiling. First of all, it is a hole (the mouth palate - abyss) from which the bomblets-landmines are flying out, dancing (tango - popular dance of 40-s). Boom! The pilot. The ace is peacefully picking his nose in curve and the next moment he is forced to land on the Slavonic territory (Belorussian, Russian?..).What's next? Think yourself. A movie has also got its own end. Here we've got another case, more interesting one. Every fragment is a picture - new film. It's classically picturesque, tender and hard, somewhere - graily-dirty (a war isn't spring anyway). The air, CO2, hydrogen, the other gas. It's hard to breathe (such is a movie).There is one request - don't look for a convenient sofa to flatter your likes and tastes. You better try to find the truth, and behid it be in time to see the aesthetics (not interior!). If you are lucky you'll transfer in the timespace (Einstein's relativism). Totally all of this pattern is just a try to come back into the future. To the new wars ..."
"A war is a river (water), and two of its banks are equally important and hated by itself. It is an absolute idea of movement, development, it doesn't need a black and white devision. The German theme has levelled a disbalance in me. The Luftwaffe pilots (the aces) on Fokkers are bombing my native Ternopil, throwing my grandmother (being still young then) as a ball. I am writing this and my mouth is watering from the pictures made up by my imagination. I envy deadly desiring to overlive all of this by myself. To overlive and feel. The world during bombing must have somewhat different look, different sun, skies, buildings. The chronicle of those years, films(soviet-military), books, knowledge, narrations, feelings - all of this is engraved in the canvas, some kind of a film, with a bigger time condensation. The film is transformed into depth, the sphere of empirical perception of reality. The reality of that war."
Sergii Chaika