NEW YORK – At the height of its recurrent fall programming, Art at the Institute presented an evening vernissage featuring fanciful color etchings by Lviv-based Ukrainian artist Roman Romanyshyn, titled “Miscellanea.” Spanning three decades, this mini-survey demonstrates the artist’s cumulatively complex and uniquely personal approach to the intaglio printmaking technique.
Curated and introduced by Walter Hoydysh, Ph.D., director of Art at the Institute, the exhibit, which was on view from November 16 to December 16, 2018, marked the artist’s first solo showing in New York.
The city of Lviv is synonymous with illusory printmaking. A strong and critical tendency for fantasy and imaginative art burgeoned there during the 1960s, particularly in that medium. Humanism, typical for this work, transmuted into a unique visionary form. It seemed attractive at that time perhaps because it presented fantasy as an avenue for people to overcome the constraints and burdens of daily reality.
Mr. Romanyshyn’s iconic and characteristic approach to narrative graphics, illustration and printing is practiced within the deep reaches of a centuries-old Leopolitan tradition that includes the work of modern and contemporary peers such as Alexander Aksinin, Ihor Bilykovsky, Oleh Denysenko, Bohdana Fedorovych, Ivan Ostafiychuk, Volodymyr Pihinin, Ihor Podolchak, Bohdan Soroka and Myron Yatsiv. By applying techniques of the old masters, these artists were and are instrumental in connecting historic custom with current practice.
Courtesy the UIA
Roman Romanyshyn, “Yellow Submarine,” 2013 (color etching, 9 by 9¾ inches, edition of 50).
In addition to his oeuvre of paintings and sculptural objects, Mr. Romanyshyn is a prolific printmaker. One of the uncontested contemporary masters of the etching in Ukraine, his work goes to the heart of things and beings, his search invariably poetic, leaving freedom to his emotion, ceaselessly reviving the power of literal likeness and fantastic suggestion. He is an artist who finds in the intaglio approach the answer to his artistic needs, fully embracing the technique and reinventing it in each work. Mr. Romanyshyn is an artist who tells stories – his stories – between ink and copper plate.
Drawing inspiration from literature, fables and folklore, these mostly smallish artworks are filled with symbols, parables, and lessons for living. As if from a youthful perspective, Mr. Romanyshyn rediscovers beloved antiquated and modern themes – whether the planetary and zodiacal, mythic animals, Alice in Wonderland, or the Wives of Henry VIII – illuminating them with child-like abandon. His exuberant sense of humor, fantasy and lust for invention overflow to create a carnival-like atmosphere evocative of folk theater. He offers something from a perfectly managed whimsical performance, but, at the same time, a charming pathos of clear imagination. His images present characters and set scenes that compel us to further fashion a narrative he expressively begins.
The delightful worlds of youth are the leitmotifs of his etchings. A tangle of lines and small, colored ideograms suggesting allegorical characters, animals, planetary elements and household objects enlivens a vivid, textured surface. This imagery leads Mr. Romanyshyn to expand his sense of pictorial space. Despite their small, intimate format, his older works look ahead to the system of organization in the newer larger prints.
His meticulous multi-plate intaglio process demonstrates an artisanal way to draughtsmanship and illustration; it is authentic, dynamic and splendid. It possesses something irreplaceable from the now ubiquitous digital methods. The figures that dominate his work portray spirited personalities and his cosmic and earthly landscapes are mind-bending, all of which make the worlds Mr. Romanyshyn creates so enchanting and engaging.
Visual deception and trompe l’oeil are not part of the artist’s vocabulary. The various signs that recur in his prints do not became static symbols or substitutes for ideas; they are not the enigmatic images of Bosch or the hieratic symbols of ancient cults. The dignified and precise markings by his hand remain in them and endow them with life. With the same instinct, he understands the behavior of color and the limited etching implements he uses. He knows the power and the temperature of each color, those that combine favorably and those that repel each other. With tools which produce a startling variety in his line and form he attacks his smooth matrix surfaces that absorb, blur, graduate from dark to light or allow sharp definitions, and with equal delight he explores a rough grain that rips the color from the paper and shows its tooth while refusing to be disciplined.
Courtesy the UIA
Roman Romanyshyn, “Alice Series (Who Stole the Tarts?),” 2015, (color etching, 9 by 7 inches, edition of 50).
Breaking with mature artistic conventions, Mr. Romanyshyn shows his magic power to transform that which is banal into a paper surface rich with the qualities we need to nourish our imagination. But it is not only an exuberance which frequently has been classified as childlike that affords Mr. Romanyshyn to successfully give free rein to his spontaneity of voice. It is a balance between this force and a rigid discipline which demands that he strip all that is superfluous from his imagery and give full value to opposing tensions in what remains between the main figure depictions, their backgrounds and the surface.
His visual creations begin with his interpretations of perceived reality which are skillfully redefined and rewoven into a rich tapestry that is characterized by its awesome precision and miraculous fantasy. His art is held in check by an exquisitely disciplined sense of tradition, storytelling, harmony and balance. Ultimately, he channels his aims into a love for craft and the occasional fortuitous accident.
The artist’s way of seeing the world around him, of even seeing himself, is compounded of guilessness, mirth and surprise. He stares wide-eyed and lost in wonderment, like a child, probing each detail of the spectacle before his eyes. While he gracefully accepts that his vision of the world is ingenuous and earthy, he knows that to make pictures which would not be overly folksy, quaint or awkward he has to maintain a sense of composition and conduct himself with contemporary pictorial methods. Mr. Romanyshyn gets a lot of fun out of turning his visions into pictures, for as he works in concentration he finds relief by concealing initial motivations behind a sparkling mask of gaiety, humor, wit, fantasy and ambiguity.
Mr. Romanyshyn is one of the most traditional and modern of his peers, if not the most personal and the most universal, and hence the most anonymous. Like a child, he is pitiless in his curiosity and his selection. These paradoxes are the inevitable result of his understanding of the ambiguity of life itself.
“Miscellanea” is an exhibition that asks us, the viewers, to linger. What is unique about these prints is that they require an extraordinary attention to detail. Surely, a knowledge of history, technique and the elements of allegory will add further interest for any viewer. Regardless the level of visual literacy, the most important thing, however, is to just look. With theatricality, Mr. Romanyshyn’s intaglio prints contain a sense of lyrical whimsy touching the evolution of storytelling and the differences between every human sensibility. And yet, even as we are drawn from very different stuff, we all cling together. These works have resonance and bring a smile to my face.
Mr. Romanyshyn graduated from the Lviv State Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts (Ukraine). His graphic works are widely exhibited and collected around the world and have won multiple awards for printmaking; among them, 14th Mini Print International, Barcelona; ninth International Miniature Print Exhibition, Seoul; fourth International Painting Biennial of the Carpathian Euroregion, Przemyśl (Poland); and Intaglio: First Triennial of Small Prints, Kyiv. This fall, Mr. Romanyshyn travelled to Guangzhou and Tianjin (China) in celebration of his newly published monograph, “The Collection of Ex Libris & Mini Prints,” supported by exhibitions, lectures and fine printmaking demonstrations. He lives and works in Lviv.