About "Shimmering" - the favourite series of Anatoliy Gankevich.

Anatoliy Gankevich was born in Odessa. Anatoliy Gankevich is one of the leading representatives of contemporary art in Ukraine. The beginning of his artistic activity starts in 1990. He works in a unique technique - mosaics imitation. Showing what doesn't really exist, replacing the agonizing reality, the artist manipulates the viewer as a magician. And this manipulation is intended to cause an emotion of happiness.

Mosaic language is attractive because it has many symbolic depths. The relationship between general and particular. As a consciousness: everyone has their own, but we have one in common. Also in the mosaic: each piece lives separately, but combining all the pieces is a big picture. This meaning is read, but unconsciously.

Probably one of my favorite episodes is "Shimmering". She is the cleanest. Again, here is the mosaic principle of the general and the particular. It is repeated in the plot. The sun is split into thousands of parts and is scattered in mosaic waves. I was in a very romantic mood then. I traveled a couple of years, collected material for the exhibition, discovered many seas and oceans.

Anatoliy Gankevich

Anatoliy began to experiment on the base of zinc white. He was very afraid that a thick layer of paint would crack, and after trial and some mistakes it suddenly turned out. Dividing the large format into small parts, it has already become cracked - craquelure. And as a result, each piece individually acquired the desired elasticity and was comfortably deformed.

The technology developed by itself, or maybe I unconsciously looked for a new method, language, because I wasn't a very good student in painting.

Anatoliy Gankevich

Anatoliy is studying all the time. When he touch on a particular topic, he dive deep into the material and pull out everything he need. So it turns out that all the work is about himrself.

For example, Anatoliy Gankevich was once interested in food, the cult of food. And he thought to make the “The-Lesser-Dutchmen Paintings” big and monumental? 2 x 3 meters size in mosaic. As if the food was cut, cooked already at the creation of some supreme cook for a global feast. The first paintings was a copy, and food was removed from the subsequent copies and after that two objects remained, wine and bread - symbols of the sacrament and transfiguration.

In my approach, first I try to “see.”

That means feeling the state, atmosphere, smell, feeling the image, and then looking for plastic and color solutions and crushing everything into pieces. Pixelization is a compression, reduction, optimization, simplification of information for the speed of perception. And his mosaic technology is much faster than classic monumental. It is simplified, but the effect remains the same.

"Shimmering" is about light and reflection - the basis of perception, the foundation of our psyche. Each glint, particle, is a separate, small, rough, distorted reflection of a perfectly rounded sun that appears on the surface of the sea and disappears after some time.

Artists, creating works, in my opinion, are solving only their personal tasks. But these tasks are universal and can resonate with the viewer, affect his personal problems and cause interest.

Anatoliy Gankevich