Myroslav Vayda’s practice encompasses a broad spectrum of forms: installations, land art, and performance. In recent years, with meditative precision, the artist has immersed himself in painting. All his expressions share a sense of accuracy and succinctness, expressiveness, and a deep respect for materials. In his paintings, Vayda works with abstraction, paying special attention to color and texture, without betraying his minimalistic style.
Just as black absorbs light rays, a series of black canvases, which the artist is currently working on, has become a concentrated form of his explorations within the nonfigurative field. The series began in 2018 during a residency in Katowice, Poland. It was there, at Vayda’s solo exhibition titled “Light Frequency,” that the first black canvases of the series and the object “Compressed Light” were presented. This residency became a catalyst, an impulse whose reverberations continue to echo — work on the series, with breaks for other projects, has been ongoing for several years now.
Black, as the absence of light reflecting off an object, takes on a different nature in Vayda’s works, thanks to the play of textures on the surface, which create micro-objects that reflect light in various ways. Through these reflections, black acquires dynamic properties, and due to its achromatic nature, it allows one to focus entirely on these textures and reflections. In his monochromes, the artist sought to achieve materiality, and a rich, textured quality in the formal abstraction, generously applying paint to the canvas without hesitation.
What Vayda finds appealing about black is that, despite its association with emptiness and infinity, when worked with texture, it becomes pulsating. In side lighting, the “emptiness” gleams, pulses, plays, and much of this play depends on how the light is directed. In this way, in his canvases, the artist “crystallizes” this emptiness, structuring space. The effect of creating emptiness is combined with materiality, so that this emptiness is not merely perceived as absence but as space, a void, depth. The internal dynamics give the effect of movement and space, rather than a flat surface.
Both the creation process and the perception process are deeply organic here. The textures refer not directly, but indirectly, to the natural environment by their very nature. Vayda’s love for texture and his skillful work with it likely stem from his first artistic education: “I’ve always adored wood — its texture, its smell. When you carve, it’s a meditation, a Buddhist calm,” Vayda admits.
The artist sees pure, succinct form and pure color as optimal tools for achieving a sense of unity and wholeness with the world. They have the ability to prompt direct interaction with the viewer, removing prejudices and ready-made constructs: “It’s as if you’re standing next to a waterfall, naked, alone with your environment, with the world. Movement in the darkness, blindly, groping, allows you to feel the materiality of space. At the same time, darkness absorbs, disturbs with the unknown, entices like anything unfamiliar, and calls for discovery. Nonfiguration and the absence of recognizable images in the conventional sense. Only by freeing yourself from the compulsive urge to explain something, to articulate it clearly, to differentiate and categorize, to structure — only by liberating yourself from this, it becomes easier to breathe. There is nothing more realistic than abstraction. Because painting is painting; it doesn’t imitate anything. It simply is painting.” With these thoughts, the artist shares his reflections on the project and the state beyond verbal definitions he seeks to evoke in the viewer.
Overcoming resistance, the barrier of prejudices and familiar concepts, requires effort, but when achieved, it leads to a plane of sensitivity, akin to stepping into open space. In this weightlessness, it becomes possible to merge with the artwork in the way the artist intends: “Beyond prejudices, concepts, and constructions, poetry emerges.”
Natalia Matsenko