INSIDE ONESELF

 

The last cycle of works of SergiI Chaika is related to the recent past of the Soviet era, but the author may not be blamed for the nostalgic flush of passion for the past. He does not idealize it, but rather invites to a serious conversation and appears as a modern curator and moderator of serious understanding on the background of cultural degradation of contemporary left-liberal discourse and postmodern.

He takes the simplistic material of visual archive of photographs and cinematographic film as the underlying storyline and like Marcel Duchamp transfers it to the exhibition space before the observer, who does not even remember the visual row of mass-media of the 50s of the previous century.

As an artist and cultural expert, Chaika insists on deliberate attention to this era, when a man was the one of integrity and hoped for a glittering future. Duchamp with his object “R Mutt” indicated the urinal directions of the Western culture, draft to individualism, a rebel of the body, radically anticipating youth rebel of the 60s and pop-culture, so surely capturing art scene of modernity, which is occupied by fashionable curators, which imitate the western trend as a carbon-copy in the third world.

Chaika addresses times of his childhood, and that is habitual not only for him but to other elderly and eminent artists of modern Ukraine, as Ilya Kabakov, Igor Kopystianskyi, Andriy Sagaydakovskyi, Sergei Geta, Sergei Sherstyuk. They all are the best representatives of Ukrainian and world modern art of the older generation, and Sergii Chaika venerably carries on the tradition.

 

Nikolai Filatov