Nikita Kadan’s solo exhibition is ongoing at Voloshyn Gallery

On the morning of October 10, 2022, Russia carried out one of the largest massive shelling of Ukrainian cities. In Kyiv, Shevchenko Park was targeted, where a Russian rocket exploded on the children’s playground. For Nikita Kadana it becomes a point of reference to think about the pervasive threat of our daily lives.

Places of family walks and meetings turn into places of sorrow. Sandpits become craters from rocket debris. UP Culture tells how Kadan’s new works reflect this reality, and reminds that the exhibition can be viewed until March 31.

In 2022, the artist Nikita Kadan started a series of paintings “Shadow on Earth”, depicting a black field and a human shadow reflected on its surface. The artist himself says that since March this image has become recurring for him: “I was definitely inspired by the image of the “fertile soil” of Ukraine with all its colonial connotations; photographs of the invaders’ corpses and the well-known narrative about seeds in pockets; photographs of their victims; temporary graves on agricultural land; trenches that have become places of mass burials; land pollution as a result of war; coming famine; bodies yet to be discovered; “poisoned landscapes”.

Kadan’s new works at the exhibition “The beam enters the soil” continue the thematic line that war moves through the earth. Landscapes absorb the memory of the past without undergoing any particular transformations: holes are filled with a new portion of soil, shells are buried deep in the ground. Man, on the other hand, becomes a bearer of memory, being in these changed landscapes.

The exhibition containssculptures, charcoal drawings and paintings created by Nikita Kadan in 2024. They are all about the “thoroughness” or “thoroughness” Kadan mentions in the opening statement. This is another attempt to show how pervasive violence is in war. It does not disdain energy infrastructure, civilian houses, or playgrounds, encroachment on which appears to be the highest form of evil.

The charcoal paintings depict huge ravines in the middle of depopulated places, putting the viewer in a position where he is in front of such a ravine. And all that remains is to look into the void left by the blow.

On another canvas, a person is hidden underground. Her figure is white and contrasts with the black ground background. The land, meant to be a protection, turns into a place where one can never feel the ultimate safety. A person in her womb becomes extremely small and gradually loses its own outlines.

The sculptures in the exhibition are variations of ladders from children’s playgrounds. Now inside them there are spikes, which certainly do not contribute to innocent children’s games. The ladder you are climbing can hit you at any moment. The sculpture as a whole does not resemble a utilitarian thing that serves a child to learn about space, have fun or play with peers. Children’s dexterity will sooner or later run into sharp corners. The only thing that attracts such a ladder is its cold metallic shine, the shimmer of which can be enjoyed from afar, but without running up the ladder.

One of the sculptures is the rays of the half sun. She refers to Kadan’s other work “Private suns” from 2013, where the artist reinterpreted the “sun” – the Soviet lattices on windows, which are also common in our time. They were a kind of barrier between the routine, triviality of daily existence and utopian dreams. The new sun at the exhibition is metallic and sharp. The attributes of childhood cease to be carefree and become overgrown with thorns.

The space of the gallery brings us to the last two paintings placed on either side of the hot sun. Drawn from archival photographs of Red Army soldiers frozen in trenches during the Second World War, they deceive the viewer’s vision and thinking. We cannot guess whether the fighters in the paintings simply fell asleep, whether they are in a trench or in a grave. Perhaps they are already covered with earth, and a ray that enters the soil falls on their feet.

Kadan manages to beat the image of safe and dangerous environments. Trenches resemble graves, where temporary respite and recuperation become death. The metallic sun on the playground hurts, not amuses.

“We have to plunge into this earthen dance floor for so long that the words “year” or “day” will lose any meaning“, says Kadan. And it will have to be buried in order to protect this space from strangers. Do not allow the Russian rocket to enter the soil. Let real sunlight enter there.