Mykola Lukin

Groundwater

acrylic and colored pencils on paper. 100 × 70. 2022/2023

My world is a tabernacle in the boundless expanse of a blank sheet, constantly expanding, rotating among other such Galaxies-tabernacles. Blue drops of stars from the Milky Way, a shadow of a movement trace, and a tiny open door in a small spiral Arm of Orion, between the major arms of Perseus and Sagittarius. This is Earth. This is my home.

To hide in a box called the Solar System from the vastness that cannot be contained in the consciousness of the external world, pure, detached, indifferent and irrational. My box, AO-7735, with traces of tape on the sides and double staples on the edge. There is a cozy, familiar world there, known like the back of one’s hand, with a single center, with a linear order from big to small, from simple to complex, with a value system that claims nothing.

In this little den of mine, there is a saucer for food, a corner for sleep. It’s warm, cramped, poorly light, smelling of dampness and mold. You hardly realize here something different may exist.

The walls catch the sunlight. The child’s gaze is pensive and carefree. The stripes of diagonal light do not yet frighten with their emptiness. But this emptiness is constantly growing around the small figure of a child in oversized adult clothing.

Children’s thoughts are colorful. But the color is just a flash of car headlights. And the sun in children’s thoughts is colorless. It’s part of a black-and-white world with rays, strokes, and cracks. The luminary has cracked.

Descending into darkness, the stairs twist, crumble, pass through each other, and bump into walls. It’s a nightmarish dream. Sometimes you have to squeeze forward along a very narrow path. But ahead, there’s only darkness.

And from the darkness of the basement, groundwater rises. The earth is flooding my home with its otherness. The box has hopelessly soaked and will soon collapse, burying inside it the coziness of the den and childhood carefreeness. There’s no escape. The aggressive groundwater rises higher with each passing day.

I get on my knees and put my head on the stool. Guillotine. I do not believe that it is possible to survive. That’s all I have the strength for. My body is an ecorche of Goya’s Drowning Dog, immersed in the black waters of nothingness.

Separate parts of the body float in consciousness. Legs without body. Body without a head. The body was cut into pieces. It burns, it shatters into pieces, it does not belong to me.

It was packed in a glossy black trash bag. Large garbage bags are multiplying every day. They are packed with bodies. Our bodies do not belong to us.

We are naked in front of each other and beheaded. And instead of a head, a pulsating image of a collapsing world with memories of childhood, receding like a horizon line. There is an exit and a round sun eaten by a monster.

The sun becomes like a skull. I don’t belong to myself. The faceless, viscous mass engulfs me. It seems to me that this is a dream. And I try to spy on what is happening in a dream. There is none of this.

Reality is like a fluted Corinthian column, which has hoisted on itself the guise of decaying narcissism.

It crowned the phallus of the flagpole with the symbol of death.

And I hurry back to my tabernacle with a multidimensional boundless world, complex and therefore beloved.

Using metaphors, juxtaposing the real and the conditional, Mykola Lukin achieves a sense of spatial and eventful cosmic imagery in a series of graphic sheets.

War forces us to change our perspective on the world, from universal incomprehensibility to tangible materiality, turning the particular into a symbol.

The artist explores his sensations with the aim of giving visual expression to the feelings evoked by a succession of everyday, like a vicious infinity, destructions, deaths, and tragedies.

“Groundwater” is like something dark, cold, coming from the bottom to the surface, uncontrollable and absorbing everything familiar, which can warm and protect.

The artist is haunted by the image of rising groundwater, which will inevitably flood the house. Powerlessness in the face of the elements, the inability to stop, cracks crawling along the walls, crumbling steps are embodied in the installation “Staircase”.

The installation demonstrates a nightmare when you need to run up a narrow staircase from the approaching water, and the staircase turns over, changes direction, crumbles, rests against the wall.

Mykola Lukin in the presented series of graphic sheets, the first of which appeared before February 24, shares with the viewer his experience of foreboding war. Reflections on the reality of the ongoing catastrophe were created by him in the first months of 2022.

Text by Vira Fenelonova

photos: Oleksiy Katarshynskyi, Ivan Strahov