Carl Zvirynsky (1923 — 1997) all my life just a painting, not relying on fame and not waiting for her tawdry evidence of rank, insignia, honours. But he was always a Teacher, whose presence and influence felt by those who became famous even before his mentor — Zinovy flint, Andriy Bokotey, Ivan Marchuk, Roman Petruk, Peter Markovich, Liubomyr Medvid. About their school, about students, the artist said, "If they were not, then I would not have been such. They also influenced me. We had to create a climate in which it would be possible to breathe. We pushed each other, enjoying the fellowship of like-minded people".
Karl Zvirynsky first studied with renowned graphics, graduate of the Prague and Berlin academies of fine arts and the Leipzig school graphics Mykola Butovich, then the famous "Lviv Parisian" Novel Rural. And in 1953 began teaching painting and composition itself. Lviv Institute of decorative and applied art, and, as they called her friends to home "spiritual Academy". Yes, his work does not fit into the canons of socialist realism, he eschewed officialdom, his talent is unfair not to admit it, but the artist, it seems, is not very distressed. His work certainly can not be called social protest. Challenge, leveling the personality of the totalitarian dogma, is his very life. In his works he created a parallel reality, though extremely solid, the world. Such a world-view already distinguishes his compositions from the end of 1950-ies created using wood, tin, cardboard, cord. So "Relief III" is made up of square and rectangular wooden planks, covered with layers of blue and purple paint; Indigo rushes forward, the purple color is getting cold in the depths of the relief. At first glance, abstract shapes, meanwhile, seemed to tell of the life of the city, its daily gambling crowding and weary night alone.
Carl Zvirynsky often said that one tends to feel the "Zeitgeist". He watched what was happening in the art world, receiving magazines from Poland, listening to foreign radio, conjecturing, reconstructing their imagination things that could not see. Perhaps this was one of his pictorial composition 1965 "across the river", which depicts a white fairytale castle with shimmering stained glass Windows and bursts whether whimsical branches, or the strange masks on its walls, encouraging the blue.
The artist, however, was surrounded by a completely other reality, and knowing about it, we unwittingly guessed her prints in abstract compositions of the master. "Relief", 1957 form a rectangular, closely fitted to each other forms a cement-gray color. From paintings like the air is pumped out. And in the picturesque "Composition X", 1970, dynamic arcs, angles and circles hang in the cold lonely emptiness. Ochre and greens pale bordered black line, like any flash is doomed, the energy of hope always turns to helplessness and despondency. Carl Zvirynsky, apparently able to sensitively listen to the world around him; a simple everyday thing in his paintings are as significant as the paint on his palette. He analyzed the methods of scenic construction and structural formula match, not trying to impose on the viewer a kind of unique point of view on the depicted subject. So even his abstract compositions are very specific; they experience genuine spiritual experiences, and not only the result of logical reasoning or simply a conceptual solution.
For example, abstract "Landscape V" created using plywood, cord, plaster, glue and paint, reminds us of the connectedness with each other all things in the world, natural neighborhood and natural and man-made in it. And in his still lifes specific world reliable, familiar, warm home things seem a fragile flooring over a metaphysical abyss. The plane on which the objects, like ustaivaet, twinkling blue-green glow of the ocean, cerebrate moon light.
The work of Carl Svirskogo possess some special magic, they seem to draw the viewer, imbuing it with the power of faith, which led in the work of the master himself. He often spoke of the hierarchy, putting, apparently, is the notion of a purely religious meaning. For him, the world did not exist the little things, every little thing intended by God their individual and exact place. I think that the artist did not have a specific purpose, except the desire to comprehend this Great Hierarchy, the very essence of being, which is sometimes so acute all of us, but so hard to put on the specific formulas and images.
Yes, Carl Zvirynsky lived, not noticing the "iron curtain" because, thanks to the painting, opened the possibility "to explore the world without leaving the yard". You can travel in cultures, and it is possible seamlessly to exist in it. This is the path chose Lviv artist. He was one with the world. Because so majestic silence, fills it with relief compositions and pictorial space. "All my painting is prayer. In it I sought to Express their amazement before the great creation of God. All I wrote was inspired by this feeling."
("Great hierarchy" Olga Lagutenko, "Capital news" No. 5 (201) 12-18 - Feb 2002)
