art + objets d'arts + photography

November 1 – 28, 2013

Vernissage Friday Nov 1 / 7 – 10pm

Naiko Tcherno-Ivanenko works on bringing to light the substance vested within flesh. INCARNATE, an LPM Gallery exhibition will present a selection of new, yet-to-be-seen paintings, center on the potential of the immaterial and invisible, testing their material limits as they become articulated in visual language.  These new paintings work on the notion of the invisible spirit as both actor and archive of sense experience.

The figures Naiko paints can therefore not be explained as ‘bodies’ in a traditional sense – they mold, adapt, and transform through space and in turn, become space. Naiko’s works dream of breaking the divide of where ‘self’ begin and where ‘self’ ends, and ask how environments might become shaped by consciousness. Is ‘environment’ given through the presence of subject, or does the very notion of ‘subject’ become lost within it?

The self, in this imagined space, reaches beyond the spaces and structures that govern the body-limit. INCARNATE offers an affirmation that the physic body invariably seeks to transcend the material.

Our physical bodies, encased in flesh and directed through the axis of the body horizon – become the context upon which to begin. As given in brilliant colour, expansive figuration and dynamic composition – we find pleasure and reason in the excess. Accordingly, this space of excess is where artistic conventions break down: between the abstract versus the figure, the foreground versus the background, and the singular, delimited subject versus the lost fragment.

However paradoxically, Naiko’s works map the space of soulful yet asymmetrical, fragmented ‘otherness’ through which to see beyond oneself. In this sense, viewers are tapped to use both an intellectual and emotional capacity to the search.

The imagined expansion or retracting of the self – to melt, drift or grow – is given through a natural impulse of the spirit. The desires and Live Sex reponses that lead us to imagine outside of ourselves, however, operate so far from cultural proscriptions of normalcy, that we can just as easily forget we have them. The instinct becomes lost – and in attempt to recover it, we can only hope to find ourselves interrupted.

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Artist Statement:

The goal of my painting -if I can express it this way- is to find this lost instinct and to confront the modern world with it. Using oil paint as my only medium, I can concentrate on experimenting and developing new techniques. I mostly use the classic brushes, complementing with the use of a knife or my fingers.

I start a painting the same way I finish it, meaning that I don’t conceive of a difference between abstract form and figuration. Each form appears, more or less consciously, which can be both a recognizable shape or an informal trace, which will then lead to another form. Colour is often the link to the “reality” that holds everything together.

Physical and spiritual nature, the landscape as human psyche are present everywhere in my paintings.

My paintings are often described as sexual, I would say they are sexed, simply as living beings are. This aspect is present, simply to translate a much larger range of emotions. I also wish to scramble the interpretation, for myself and also the spectator, so as to be transported through all the dimensions of the image. I decide very few things in advance when I start painting, but logic is always there and suprises happen.

Action painting, glazes, classical figuration that is more obvious in certain spots… oil paint allows me to work with many “styles” on one single canvas; the goal being to somewhat keep the focus on the initial intensity, the general emotion, even if the image becomes more and more complex.