Light through the Prism of Rhythm and Movement in Ihor Kalynets’s Triptych “The Sawmillers”

Abstract

Ihor Kalynets’s triptych “The Sawmillers” from the collection “Letters to Zvenyslava from Prison” emerged as a result of observing the paintings of the Ukrainian artist Oleksandr Bohomazov—a talented painter, graphic artist, pedagogue, and author of the treatise “Painting and Elements.” The triptych demonstrates a broad intermedial synthesis of lyric poetry, painting, music, and theatre. The first part, which could be titled “Light,” passionately conveys the coloristic qualities of the paintings; almost every line contains painterly markers. The oversaturation of the free verse with color is intended to reveal the stylistic features of the canvases that arose from a synthesis of Cubo-Futurism and spectralism. The first poem rests on three contrapuntal motifs: liberation (“the hot wood is being set free”), the “purification of people and wood,” and the transformation of the body into light. It seems that the poet, in his interpretation, goes further than the painter, since what is at stake is a spiritual process with its distinct stages.

The key concept of the second part of the triptych is rhythm. Can rhythm exist in painting? Oleksandr Bohomazov, one of the foremost theorists of the global avant-garde, answers this question in his treatise “Painting and Elements” (1914, 1928): for the artist, rhythm is both a qualitative and a quantitative category; even a static object has its own rhythm. Kalynets teaches how to translate the language of painting into the language of music. The construction of a house from “singing” planks sawn by workers, thanks to intermedial relations, is transformed into a sacred action, for the transformation of light in the first part and rhythm along with other musical components in the second give birth to something fundamentally new—an articulated, “living,” “energetic,” luminous home.

In the third free-verse poem, Kalynets, writing from a labor camp and circumventing censorship restrictions, takes the bold step of returning the famed Berezil theatre, the Christmas nativity play (vertep), and Mykola Kulish’s tragedy “Pathetic Sonata” to Ukrainian cultural discourse through the category of movement. The point is that this category became dominant at approximately the same time both in the activities of the Berezil theatre and in Bohomazov’s work. What is meant here is rhythm as a principle of the Universe.

As artists, Ihor Kalynets and Oleksandr Bohomazov share much in common. Interpreting Bohomazov’s paintings, Kalynets “charges” his free-verse lines with positive thinking and the conviction that Light is stronger than darkness.