balance
The art is to balance the terror of being a man
with the wonder of being a man
Carlos Castaneda
World balance stands on combination of extremes and equilibrium of contrasts. It relies upon trite, but always relevant binary oppositions of love and hate, peace and war, light and darkness, life and death. Necessity of choice is something we face every day during the entire life. Our life journey consists of the endless scope of decisions we make and actions we take. In most difficult historic time of crisis and conflicts a man faces a difficult challenge – ethical, moral, spiritual, social and cultural. The necessity to make a choice strengthens, generates individual traits, shaping personality from the matter. Personal identity forms in the process of intensive search and making decisions. The problem of self-identification is especially acute in time of controversies, and sometimes it must be solved in spite of your own desires. On the contrary, the moment when the choice have been taken and decisions made gives temporary feeling of freedom and helps gain the necessary balance. Balance is something you desperately want to keep when standing on a precipice. It is not just the state of calmness, but strained balance when each move can cost you your life. The world is on the eve of global transformation, common humanist values are at stake and everyone faces a choice: either you accept irreversible consequences of predatory expansive existence or develop in new meaningful direction.
Yuriy Koval’s project “Balance” deals with these and other aspects. Hyperrealistic images make the artist’s pictures weirdly convincing, immersing into contrastive oppositional combinations of incompatible. Collage nature and contrast of the opposites is what creates balance and harmony of the world. Everything mixes up in the endless information stream. It becomes virtually impossible to tell reality and fantasy apart or find reality reference. Flight of segments in Yuriy Koval’s works looks like images shimmering in your mind. We encounter these images day by day, and they form informational background, directly or indirectly influencing us and our decisions. Everyday scenes, emphatically cheerful fragments of “normal life” and elements of mass culture collide with rough background and pictures of grave danger and destruction. Gaping rupture in familiar world view make you look at it in a new light. It is a reminder of not only the choice, but of the fact that sometimes a person is deprived of one. The author creates a peculiar theatrical entourage, dramatic and sometimes absurd. Nevertheless, it reflects eternal paradox nature of the world and directly deals with the present. Yuriy Koval is a master of naturalistic accurate treatment of the human body movement. However, corporality is present in his pictures not only as esthetic factor, but as a universal code emphasizing importance and sensitivity, fragility of human life in general and significance of every single personality. The individual and the global, combined in the artist’s works, equally need balance. Art is one of the key instruments to achieve it, and Yuriy Koval’s project reminds of it yet another time.
Nataliya Matsenko