Harlem River N.Y.

Author: Vladimír Ossif
Curator: Silvia Van Espen
1 December 2011 – 21 January 2012

Vladimír Ossif is a nomad. He cannot stay at one place for a long time. He needs changes, he needs to move: energy of life, feelings of discovering and fascination are hidden within. He has been visiting New York regularly since the 1990s. The city full of rhythm, full of electrifying lively shivering of the streets, the city permeated with sounds, smells, kinematic presentation of a picture of the whole world in one place. The city where, as Jean Baudrillard writes, something close to a miracle happens every morning. Its strong impact and the echo of similar experience can be felt in the recent author´s work. In 2007 he leaves for New York, for his first long-term stay, in order to get to “the depth of things“, to “grasp the essence“ of this immensely vivacious organism. His pictures acquire the character of mental maps, an atlas of experience, local plans of one´s own emotional populating. Horizontals and verticals of “hippodamical“ system vary with loosen meandering undulating curve. Vladimír Ossif is lucky with New York studios in the proximity of the river.

The chessboard interrupted with unrestrained natural element disrupting its rational structure. In New York, one does not have to make up new signs, or examine anything under the microscope: one must keep the eyes open. Signs reveal themselves. Tags, urban petroglyphs, graffitti, the landscape of roofs, as well as minute “infernal“ broken pieces of city life on the pavements. Ossif´s pictures can be understood as an effort to record the unity of oppositions, to objectify them through the process of painting acting as an index sign of the constant culmination tension of the street. The paroxysm of cities is calmed down by painting, but only to the extent by which rationality regulates the spontaneous character of an exalted gesture.

Vladimír Ossif´s New York period offers a view on the city with the use of rudimentary stylized means. It still bears some references to the primary forms of Concretism or to typified calligraphy signs. Those, however, loosen even more, growing into scrums, scribbling or stains. The inspiration by streetart, by a gesture as a form of signature, is transferred into the technique used, too. On the one hand, the intervention of a spray into painting makes it “dirtier“ and blurred, on the other hand it intensifies the impression of an authentic intervention, the illusion of the space on the basis of “palimpsestic“ covering of “the previous“ by the new. The street, whose basic sign is a perpetual transformation, is transferred into the picture. Painting becomes the wall and passers-by leave their messages on its plastering. Thus in the pictures of the latest period, authenticity of the city atmosphere, which Vladimír Ossif has always been looking for, wins over.