The origin of ontologic painting

In the late 1980s I stopped doing graphics and started painting. I clearly realized that I want to create artworks with no story but an artistic event through which I will talk about the problems of my spiritual life.

This task echoed the philosophical concepts studied by ontology. The development of this philosophical concept takes a worthy place in the world philosophy. Its analytical view is directed towards being, structure, properties, forms of being (material, ideal, existential), space, time, and movement. In other words, the ontology is the doctrine of the existent. Therefore, I decided to call the content of my artworks Ontologic Painting.

The conceptual components of ontologic paintings

Doing graphic works mainly in the technique of etching by the end of the 1980s, I realized that a certain part of life, and especially of my work exhausted itself.  I wanted to create artworks the content of which was not life but being. First I did not understand how they should look like. I felt as in a fairy tale Go I Know Not Whither and Fetch I Know Not What. So, I decided to use reverse logic and tried to understand first what there should NOT be in my paintings:

1. The plot or narrative
2. Color abundance
3. Poetic realism
4. Soulful experiences connected with matter
5. Top and bottom of the painting
6. Picturesqueness in the traditional sense
7. Anything superfluous

Then I determined what my paintings should contain. After all, a new step in painting and therefore new ideas require a conceptually new artistic aspiration in expressing the research realm of a spiritual being.

The meaning of Ontologic Painting should be captured almost instantly through a range beyond sensory sensations. These moments should make previously unfamiliar chords of an immanent spiritual life sound:

1. Thoughts and ideas must be in-depth to reveal the fundamental principles of being
2. The paintings should be dominated by simple forms such as lines, triangles, circles, squares, stripes, and spots
3. The mystery of meaning prevails against clarity
4. The use natural mixed media
5. Expressing the macro through the micro
6. A Perceptual Object is desirable
7. The scale of the painting should be ascetic
8. The painting should contain some repetitive motifs fixed in viewer’s mind as the elements of my brand, e.g. a universal egg and ropes
9. Altogether my paintings should be like fragments of one large artwork. Therefore, at my solo exhibitions they can be hung very close to each other
10. Ontologic Painting exhibitions should have a quality of intense monotony
11. My artworks are not abstractions but Ontologic Paintings

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