Approaching Complexity

Walera Martynchik

Approaching Complexity


Parallel tendencies

Art of Complexity

My style in painting was formed in the seventies.
Instinctively, guided by intuition I have developed a particularly intense and intricate approach of solving a certain problem in visual Art - how compositions grow and what kind of forces take part in their development and how to find a balance between chaos and harmony in complex visual structures.
The only word, which I could use to define the nature of a problem, was complexity

Science of Complexity

Much later I have discovered that in the seventies some scientists and philosophers begun to develop theories that eventually emerged under the name of the “science of complexity”.


Provocations of digital era

My interest in complex visual structures and scientists interest in complex systems both coincided with the development of new cybernetic or digital technologies.
I recollect secretly listening a long time ago to a forbidden in USSR radio ‘Liberty’. It was the program about the first steps in developing the digital Art.
It was a shocking, brainstorming and provoking piece of news. I immediately realized that this will be a future of the visual art. I had no computer at that time, but I could certainly pretend to be a computer. I still do not use a computer to produce artworks. I am a computer myself.
I completed my first large and a complex composition in 1979 and titled it “Provocation”.

Escape into complexity

In the 1960 some artists in the West, among them Roy Lichtenstein, issued a manifesto calling for artists to leave their studios and get out on to the streets. I think that the studio environment is the same everywhere. But the street environment in the West was very different from that of the former Soviet Union where it was grey, dangerous and as simplistic first of all. I grew up in the country where almost all educated classes have been eliminated long before I was born. As a result simplicity ruled that world.
I would say aggressive simplicity. No one could escape that world physically but one could do so spiritually.
If I could issue a manifesto at that time I would have called for return to the studio, to the ivory tower, to elitism and complexity.

The Game

Mys first compositions have been constructed on principles of a Game (or Imitation Game)
The Art and philosophy of the German novelist Hermann Hesse was inspiring experience for me at that time.
And my compositions became a visual version of his “Glass Bead Game,1946].


Master of the Game
And the artist as a master of the Game has set the rules.

Fusion of styles
Eclectics were deliberately chosen and fusion of styles become the style itself
.Constituents of the Game have been all possible meanings, elements, interactions and achievements in visual art ( particularly painting)
It could be: Euclidian solids, Egyptian Gizian cubism, Strawinsky’s drawings, Illusions, , Sphinxes, Macro and Micro, Angels and Leopards, Lolitas, Madonnas and Holy Spirit.


Levels of complexity
For decades flatness dominated abstract Art of 20th century.
Pretending to be a computer and playing with 3-D I wanted to add some volumes to Kandinsky’ forms and shapes and to the spots and splashes in Pollocks works.
Curiosity has been awarded with unexpectedly chaotic, self developing structure, which demanded a certain level of complexity to come to the state of balance.

Installations on canvas
To obtain a critical mass of 3-d elements compositions became installations painted on canvas.


Cosmology of the game
From the very beginning it became clear to me that the mission of an artist is the futuristic activity. Current social and political environment was not a matter of interest of my interest as an artist. Using curiosity as a source of energy, a metaphor, as a magic wand, I wanted to constructs a system where past is an experience before the ‘Big Bang’ and future means existence after the collapse of the universe.
In the celestial division of labor, the mission of the artist is to build up a stock of new visual ideas, that would allow to shape and form a new system, new zone, new universe, new world of paradox and illusions. New worlds demand new building blocks, new elementary particles.
.And new primordial soup ought to be cooked from new primordial elements.