Esmarkh's Mug is an art society that was fixed for the first time in 2009. The fixation took place using the Live journal blog server which was also stipulated by the fact that not all the artists of Esmarkh's Mug live in Transcarpathia and the chosen means should make easier the public activity. The members of the group are Oleh Suslenko, Viktor Melnychuk, Mykhailo Khodanych, Beata Korn, Ruslan Tremba and Ivan Nebesnyk.
The sphere of interests of the group includes painting and other forms of art like installation, media-art, land-art, performance and sculpture.
While examining the creative work of each artist of the group we will not find combined plastic moves to certify their belonging to certain stylistics. This peculiarity is not accidental because the study of different problems by means of art is the group’s priority.
For all that, we can still make some division according to the interests of the group members. Oleh Suslenko and Ivan Nebesnyk made painting the priority though they also have some projects in their practice connected with installation and land-art. One can find similar features between the artists in technique but in stylistics they still differ a lot. If the paintings by Suslenko bore some resemblance with the works of figurative art representatives such as P. Rosenkvist or D. Khokni, then those by Nebesnyk are rather minimalistic with non figurative direction. Before being united into an art society the artists took part in joint projects from the beginning of the 2000s.
The couple of V. Melnychuk and B. Korn has determined the three-dimensional plastics to be the main instrument in their art system. Their works are mainly of decorative character. Sometimes artists intentionally make an accent on matching the contrasted artifacts of mass cultures with traditional painting techniques. Thus in the series of painting objects devoted to the ecology B. Korn uses ready made products – ”Lego” toys. This brought in some ambiguity that makes us interprete the matter more widely and here the question arises – where does the sphere of painting end and where does the territory of plastics or installation begin? The paintings by V. Melnychuk are made in neo hyperrealism style that became popular in the Ukrainian art in the beginning of the 2000s. In many of his portraits the author depicts the object through his sphere of interests, his personal, sometimes artificial, surrounding, this way uniting nonorganic structures into full images.
R. Tremba and M. Khodanych dwell on sculpture mainly but we can also find some of the painting among their works. Painting by R. Tremba adds to his sculpture series devoted to the philosophic matters of existence and consolidation of one’s existence in this context. In the painting series under the name ”Death” (2008) the author depicts imminence and pessimism of human part. Another painting, ”Traffic accident” (2007), reveals artist’s ironic attitude to this matter depicting the perished barely smiling.
Individualism as the search of one’s own way in art, discovering of live problems make an artist move in non-traditional directions. Herewith, of course, not only such technical side as regional or school belonging can suffer but even artist’s own manner can be sacrificed. If we go deep into the history we can see that Transcarpathian art school founders didn’t aim at imitating, they treated the problem of art development in the land thoroughly and analytically. Under different circumstances Transcarpathian art heritage would look different and it remains unknown if it could find its place in All-Ukrainian context.
Ivan Nebesnyk-junior
