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Fulfilled Utopias

Deep inside us quietly lies the mystery, a "lost paradise" - rather a need and a knowledge of its veracity, than a clear vision or proved memory.
It is a knowledge of something beautiful, which maybe once happened to you or possibly could happen in future that one can hardly identify, recognize, describe and locate in time.  Something sublime that craves for revelation, yet eludes the languages we already possess and makes us to search or invent a new one.
We are crafting and sharing our personal  utopias, and inter-infusing in a realm of daydreaming repetition, which philosopher Soren Kierkegaard mapped as a point "where ideality and reality touch each other".
There is only one way to upheave this non-existent place into being - to make it constantly happen here and now through individual artistic, poetic gesture, which yet has a common quality of overlapping, repetitive movement of mind, resurrecting the True Event. As philosopher Gaston Bachelard once put it: "In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down". Repeated and lived once again.
The art catalyzes our sense of novelty, difference and wonder as much as its profound chemistry relies on impossible repetition.
This repetition is deliberately never exactly the same as the original moment, because if it were, it would be paradoxically perceived as a fake. And these slight, shifting differences are perhaps the most interesting story in any artist's utopian oeuvre.

One of the most prolific and ingenious Ukrainian graphic and conceptual artists - Pavlo Makov - who will represent the country this year at Venice Biennale, has been developing the theme of utopia throughout his career since the 1990s.
However, he makes an important note: "...the way I understood the notion of Utopia in the period between 1992 and 2005 was different than the commonly accepted one of some impossible Future.
All that time I thought it as what was in fact going on, the Present, and I still perceive it as the most accurate description of the present day reality."
Here we come to the primordial meaning of the word. Utopia as a "no-place" in Greek etymology had a non-didactic purity, without direct implications of perfection or any kind of judgement.
It signified a pure non-existence. A story of a place that does not exist. Pavlo Makov with the hauntingly subtle, recycling visions inspired by his native city of Kharkiv, shares the detailed beauty, a myth that grows in alienation and abandonment with stunning  resilience. Moreover, he tells the story of a country, which does not exist in minds of far too many people beyond its borders.
Of a country that is under constant threat of military invasion of neighbouring Russia, especially in these days, that would gladly colonize it again and accelerate into physical disappearance.
The catalogue of Makov's early works even has a play of letters in the title: UtopiA (UA is a common abbreviation of Ukraine).
In Venice the artist will show one of his strongest recurrent "reveries" - "Fountain of Exhaustion. High Water" from his "UtopiA" cycle. A decorative urban object, which historically has been always associated with vanity, vitality and abundance, is carefully rethought and reshaped, turning into the material trace of lost paradise, of a place and life that do not exist, or maybe even into a warning sign.
This reverie is based on real story, when the artist's city was left without a water for several months, a city with dead fountains.
For Venice, it may gain quite a special comprehension.

By the way, Pavlo Makov¹ in his interviews often mentions his favourite Italian writer Italo Calvino, his book "Invisible cities". There is a prominent paragraph: “The hell of the living is not something that will be. If there is one, it is what is already here, the hell we live in every day, that we make by being together.
There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the hell, and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space.”
Maybe we could do that better, grasp the authenticity through the reveries and dreams that one is able to create and share.

¹ Artist's site: https://www.makov.com.ua/

Olia Zhuk
(Deputy director on contemporary art.
                                                          Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kiev)

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