2021, personal exhibition "duende", Cube Moscow, Moscow
"Duende" is the national creative identity of Spain, something that dominated Lorca and Picasso when they created their best works. "Duende" is passion and creation, a premonition of death and the breaking of familiar forms in the gathering of new ones. "Duende" is not a Greek muse that gives harmony and inspiration, and not even a Dionysian beginning, but a chthonic force that, in the rhythm of flamenco, captures into the funnel of its game with death, like a bullfight. In the words of the Spanish poet Federica Garcia Lorca: "duende is power, not labor, battle, not thought." Nikolay Cherednichenko expresses the phenomenon of "duende" in the form of nervous pulsation, tension of continuous formation. The rejection of the spatial coordinate system in his canvases translates the plastic language of the duende series of paintings into metaphysical. His non-objective creativity draws the viewer to the Universal. The symbol and expression of "duende" in the paintings of Nikolai Cherednichenko becomes a rhizome. The rhizome is organic, has no center, is neither unity nor multiplicity, and has the character of an absent structure, eliminating the possibility of unity of the code. Quoting Lorca again, let's say: "There is only one thing duende is not capable of, and this should be emphasized – repetition." Therefore, despite the common features of the paintings of the "duende" series, they do not form a common code: neither in their unfolding in space, nor in the possibilities of reading them. The pulsation of intense colors and broken shapes does not allow the eye to stop: in front of us is a background with lines on top or fragments of a broken integrity that reveal another surface underneath. Before our eyes, the plane of a two-dimensional canvas acquires the illusion of spatial dimension, like Victor Vasareli's op-art. There is a centrifugal movement that violates the strict rectangle of the canvas boundaries, a fourth dimension is added to the third dimension – a temporary one, showing the continuous formation and unfolding of painting in the space around and in the viewer's perception. The series of works "duende", at first perceived as eight rectangular canvases of abstract painting, turns into not just non-objective art outside the structure, but an operation that removes the opposition of form and content. "Duende" is an energy, a process, the formation of the substance of colors, but never a definite form, and not a repeatable principle.