What does naming things mean? There’s this episode in Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude where everyone loses memory and is forced to sign all things lest they forget their purpose. The issue was not with the things as such but with the protagonists losing memory. We’ve been talking about things ostensibly going bad or losing meaning because of wrong or vain usage, but this only distracts us from the negligence of those who speak in vain.
In last year’s Shelter project, we focused on mundane objects that still somehow signalled the distant war. I was fascinated by naming things because they helped me to point out other, very concrete things. Now I prefer, insofar as it is possible, to avoid naming things altogether. Actually, not naming them is the most organic strategy for me. Once you acknowledge a thing as known you lose the path to it. Once you assign an object a position in the system, you only circle the essence without getting any closer to it. I always worked closely with time: a paintbrush or pencil movement happens in time; hence, each work has its own history. I start tracing a line, but it might change completely in the blink of an eye. A work in progress is like a map in flux: borders shift, blur and lose all meaning, or, vice versa, gain tension and implode. A work appears to grow inward, allowing a viewer to see its history at a glance. The objects that I question, that is, are not in sharp focus; I look at them sidewise. I’d rather not see things completed.
We started the conversation with trying to establish what the names of things represent, and at what stage they might replace the things altogether. Well then, we might do well to avoid names, and not just because of the risk of memory loss: a desire to find things among the rubble of identical names also plays a part. After all, “freedom” invoked in vain and “freedom” that is worth fighting and dying for have identical pronunciation and spelling.
With every drawing I create, I prefer not to know the endpoint. A white surface is like a room in the dusk, where the outlines of objects are blurred. I wander around, touching some things, getting hurt by others. But it offers me clear definitions, much finer than bright light affords. Daylight reality sets too many optical traps masked by the play of light and shadow. Meanwhile, once you discover an object by touch or stumble across it in the dusk, you realize that it’s not an illusion, that it really exists.

I’m interested not so much in discovering an object as in obtaining evidence of its existence. That’s what you might mean by “stumbling” across a thing: I don’t necessarily see it, but it hurt me.
The Kyiv Diary, which, I think, I have finally completed, often used deliberately absurd or unreal imagery to document real events with utmost precision. Paradoxically, that was my way of setting the snare for things. I also appreciated the experience of drawing very concrete events, steering clear of generalizations. Concrete events, after all, reflect not the whole that they ostensibly belong to but something alien, that which we cannot discover in advance. Without a doubt, concrete events also reflect us, that is, something within that we have not grasped or had forgotten. My work on the series pivoted on the crucial choice: I drew only those concrete events that appeared to look inside me and shine light on things I didn’t know about myself.
Generally speaking, I seldom scrutinize things directly, from up close. Once I choose an object to paint, I try to forget everything I know about it, at least for the time being.
For example, in the Shelter project I intentionally chose the situations that are so familiar and mundane that, ostensibly, they can tell us nothing of value. My goal was to forget both the peaceful everyday life and the war. Old photographs depicting peaceful life during wartime had always caused me anxiety and discomfort. I felt embarrassed when I saw nothing in them but everyday life. People ate, went out with their children and dressed well, that is, their fears and the anxious tension of their era remained invisible. In my works for the Shelter project, I “lit up” each image, as if showing the peaceful life during wartime from within: familiar routines grew heavy with a sense of danger, vulnerable like burnt skin.

Of course, it’s well worth stating what is it that you don’t know about things. It’s easy, really: when talking about the things that you do know, you cannot avoid repetitions, and then, meanings get lost in them. It’s well worth staying silent about the things that you do know: if you’ve said it before, you must have already completed and materialized it. You can only materialize a thing once, at least when using artistic language. To materialize a thing, you have to pass through ignorance. There’s no other way.
My works speak only about things I don’t know, because they are defined by performance rather than content. I might get the result I expected, but it doesn’t necessarily come in the form that I envisioned when I was starting out. Performance is akin to open-ended thinking: the paths I took when working remain accessible in my works.
Obviously, to reach the place you already inhabit, the place where you are poised in front of an object that you ostensibly intend to name, you have to mind the boundaries against which you might test the methods with which you will establish the authenticity of the object.
In point of fact, I mean the boundaries that defined the object as you worked, when it was coming into being, because it has to come into being somewhere eventually. I defined its coordinates, which I couldn’t learn beforehand, precisely by naming it as I worked.
Speaking of the present, we all found ourselves in an unfamiliar situation. For instance, we might have heard of war, but we are not familiar with it. We encountered so many new objects that we don’t always cope well with acknowledging them.
What prevents us from defining our present location?
What about our right not to acknowledge that which we do not understand?
While we dragged our feet before confronting the past, the future crept ever closer. We try to define lines of contact in order to establish what have changed in us, and what didn’t. This line never stays still. We are balancing on it. We’ll fall the moment we try to commit it to paper, be it for the common good or to set us at ease.
My works document similar processes: I keep wrestling with the tension between blank space and things that become visible or existent as the result of my work. But the intensity of my work is contingent not only on the extraordinary situation we are facing. My works always pass through stages of “states of emergency,” otherwise nothing would ever happen.
Even during the times of peace, many things are poised on the brink of explosion, even if it’s not immediately apparent.

When talking in the times of crisis and war, I find it of utmost importance to conscientiously allot each thing its rightful place. The risk of halting or losing something in seemingly peaceful times did not seem all that fatal. But now, when human lives, devastation and daily reports from the frontline have become time’s currency, it would be a malfeasance to lose something important through negligence or a lapse in readiness to watch, see, discern. I started to note it not so much out of a sense of responsibility as out of wonder at seeing the things that I previously wouldn’t find outside of the most hidden shelters come to the surface, gain visibility. The things that used to be confined to metaphors seeped into reality. I always wondered what happened to humans, to human bodies under different circumstances. The present ordeals made bodies speak, that is, reality seems to speak through bodily changes. The trope of fragmentation that I used when depicting bodies had entered reality during wartime, with the appearance of soldiers and civilians who lost their limbs in hostilities. Reality is howling at us through things that can be seen rather than just guessed at. Hannah Arendt describes “Goethe’s conviction of the factual existence of an Urphaenomen, an archetypal phenomenon, a concrete thing to be discovered in the world of appearances in which ‘significance’ … and appearance, word and thing, idea and experience, would coincide.”1 But, to counter the incursion of a reality so bright that it might outshine everything beyond it or everything it could portend, we should remember the interplay of truth content and subject matter in a work, described by Walther Benjamin thus: “the work’s truth content is the more relevant the more inconspicuously and intimately it is bound up with its subject matter.”2
From the very first days of art school, we’ve been taught not to look at things we depict directly. This professional trick that helps to maintain the integrity of vision is equally relevant when examining the interplay between what I want to say and how I intend to do it. Ultimately, what matters is that you don’t prematurely grow complacent in your knowledge about the thing that you intend to name in a work. You cannot pin down the essence of a thing while staring at it head on: it slinks back, fleeing the gaze.
As I said, when conceptualizing a work or during work, in a way, I collect something like proof that a thing that I’m interested in exists. It is best when said proof is circumstantial and can be prodded or challenged further. It’s essential that I choose a course, perspective or a way of looking that allows me not to lose track of the primary objective by prematurely recognizing it.
I’d put the emphasis on resisting the temptation of equating the thing that I am scrutinizing with its visible aspect. Equations or similarities draw the line, slamming the door shut in the face of those who seek entrance. For this very reason I choose to speak about very concrete things, approaching something else, something that is absent in the image, through them. The only reason to leave out the key thing or to leave it in the dark, where it cannot be seen, is the fact that it cannot be represented, it cannot be named directly, much like you could not look straight at Medusa without the risk of turning to stone (turning mum? losing speech? a thing? yourself?).

Many need the comfort of recognition based on visual similarities. You may evoke visual similarities between two objects exclusively in order to discuss something else entirely. Manipulating such similarities may become a tool, or, better yet, a course that sets things in motion, leads them out to us and makes them visible, if only for a short while. In Shelter, I put a nuclear mushroom’s similarity to a tree crown or an umbrella on centre stage, but that was beside the point. Some pointed out that I’ve touched on Chernobyl in my meditations, but, even if I meant nothing of the sort, there was something to that rationale. There’s little doubt that, historically, it’s the Chernobyl catastrophe that marks “the beginning of an end” of the illusion of safety. In the last year’s series, I focused on the safe world and spaces that may be recognized as shelters. I was interested not so much in things as such but rather in the preconditions of their existence. This implies that a viewer who rushed past the paintings, with his glance grasping only the familiar, lost both the familiar and the essential.
The language of art has to be a revelation. It neither defines things nor, obviously, imitates them. A revelation grants us not a copy or a mirror reflection of a thing but the thing itself, reaching for us through artist’s word. The things that clutter the graveyards of memory in their familiarity cannot be used, they cannot become a meaningful rallying cry. You can neither fight for them nor retain them.

Volodymyr Budnikov, Vlada Ralko, Kyiv. 2016