Hyperrealism Of Shaken Consciousness

Abstract

The article analyzes the transformation of the artistic consciousness of the majority of Ukrainian artists in the conditions of Putin’s war in Ukraine. It is traced how the barbarism of the orcs gave rise to psychological and creative resistance in the artistic environment. The logic in the grotesque-reductive series of works by V. Kravets is analyzed. The method of the artist’s work with the wide use of meaningful metaphors is shown. As a critic of the brutality and barbarism of the enemy army, the author of the drawings makes the body-lower sphere a generalizing image of the “all-Russian body”. It is shown that the characters of the series are monsters, their images are essentially excrement. This grotesque realism is so demeaning — hyperrealism, figurative recoding in the drawings of V. Kravets connects his method to the concept of the “tragic carnival” of German expressionism of the 1930s–1950s. Irony and sarcasm bordering on the terrible illustrate the relevance of a series of drawings, depicting existence on the shaky border between “life and death”. Laughter in the artist’s works changes from plus to minus.