Exhibition view

Once the artist has read the poetry of Vasyl Stus…and started a dialog between a written text and an image. An embodiment of this dialog is the “book of the artist”. The book, presented in the National Art Museum of Ukraine, is based on the poetic cycle of Vasyl Stus “Kostomarov in Sarativ”, in which the poet reflected his harsh but realistic view on the time of his imprisonment.
Andre Jolive always was interested in this form of art, which starts its history in the first years of XXth century. “Book of an artist” is a book, created as an art object, or an art object, created as a book. Visual images in such a work are not only illustrations, they no longer play secondary role. They are an answer, an artist’s reflection to the images, created by word.
More than ten years ago the artist paralleled a text and an image, adding drawing and painting to different documents, for instance, to records about order violation, extracts from current account etc. These works inspired him for creation of “books of the artist”. In 1995 the artist created his first “book of the artist”, “A short essay about medicine” together with a poet Bruno Geneste.
Works by Andre Jolive are the whole world of pulsating, multiplying and moving colors, points, and bodies. And among this glimmer, human bodies-mutants emerge, like shadows, often looking like some hypertrophied organs. Body-parts of animals and humans exists in color spaces, accrete in chimerical creatures, embodying in this decorative polychromy an idea of decay and destruction of the body, hopelessness because of impossibility to return human Self. A body becomes a reflection of consciousness, broken to pieces.

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