Museum of Modern Renaissance
Art of Magic - Magic of Art.
We are working together on each piece creating our art without any preliminary sketches always use black background for our painting. We work in different media: sculpture, oil on canvas and oil pastel. Usually, we make several pieces in the row creating a collection of artworks. Our inspiration and emotional momentum drive us forward from one artwork to another until the entire collection is complete.
Museum of Modern Renaissance
THE THEORY OF LIVING PRESENCE
A Philosophy of Art by Nicholas Shaplyko and Ekaterina Sorokina
The Central Principle
Art is matter transformed by human presence.
A work of art is not defined by its physical materials alone. Pigment, canvas, stone, bronze, paper, sound, and space are only its visible substance.
Art begins when human consciousness, emotion, memory, imagination, intention, and lived experience become embodied within that substance.
We call this transformation Living Presence.
What Is Living Presence?
Living Presence is the invisible human reality preserved within a work of art.
It is created through attention.
It accumulates through time.
It is shaped by thought, perception, discipline, doubt, discovery, suffering, joy, intuition, and love.
The artist does not merely arrange material. The artist transfers an inner state into material form. Through this process, the physical object becomes a carrier of human experience.
The material remains visible.
The presence within it cannot be seen directly, yet it can be encountered.
This encounter is what gives genuine art its power.
Art as a Carrier of Experience
Human beings have always searched for ways to preserve what cannot otherwise be held.
Literature records human experience through words.
Music records it through sound and silence.
Architecture records it through proportion, space, and light.
Dance records it through movement.
Painting records it through color, rhythm, form, symbolism, and visual relationships.
Each art form uses a different language, but all perform the same extraordinary act: they allow the inner experience of one human being to enter the consciousness of another.
A reader may suffer for an imaginary character.
A listener may experience grief through a melody composed centuries ago.
A viewer may feel joy, unease, recognition, or longing before an image created by a person they never knew.
This is not an accidental effect of art.
It is its essential function.
The Difference Between Art and an Object
Not every object contains Living Presence.
An object may be skillfully produced, aesthetically attractive, fashionable, expensive, or technically accomplished and still remain internally silent.
Technique alone does not create art.
Beauty alone does not create art.
Novelty alone does not create art.
An object becomes art when it carries an authentic human experience that can awaken experience in another person.
Therefore, the difference between art and non-art does not lie primarily in material, style, subject, price, reputation, or institutional approval.
The difference lies in presence.
An ordinary object occupies space.
A work of art creates an encounter.
The Accumulation of Presence
Living Presence may deepen over time.
Throughout history, human cultures have recognized that certain objects can accumulate memory, devotion, attention, and meaning. Sacred images, ritual artifacts, ceremonial masks, manuscripts, monuments, heirlooms, and places of worship were never understood merely as physical things. They became vessels of collective experience.
A work of art may undergo a similar transformation.
It begins with the consciousness of its creator. It is then encountered by viewers, carried through generations, interpreted anew, remembered, loved, rejected, rediscovered, and understood differently by each era.
The work itself may remain materially unchanged.
Its field of meaning continues to grow.
It acquires not only the memory of its creation but also the memory of its encounters.
In this sense, great art is never finished.
Its physical creation ends.
Its inner life continues.
Color as Living Language
Color is not merely decoration or surface.
It is light perceived by the human nervous system and transformed into emotional and psychological experience.
Color can create warmth or distance, harmony or tension, movement or stillness. It can awaken associations before language has time to intervene.
In painting, color becomes a form of transmission.
The artist organizes color, rhythm, line, scale, and form into a visual structure through which an inner condition can be communicated.
The painting does not simply describe an emotion.
It recreates the conditions through which emotion may arise in another human being.
Thus, the viewer does not merely understand the artwork intellectually.
The viewer may experience it physically, emotionally, intuitively, and subconsciously.
The Artwork as an Independent Presence
Once a genuine work of art has been created, it is no longer only an extension of its artist.
It begins an independent existence.
It enters spaces the artist may never see.
It speaks to people the artist may never meet.
It produces interpretations the artist may never have intended.
It may reveal meanings that were present unconsciously during its creation.
The artwork becomes a meeting place between two living realities: the consciousness preserved within the work and the consciousness of the person encountering it.
Every true encounter creates a new meaning.
This is why the same painting can affect different people in entirely different ways—and why one person may encounter the same work differently at different moments of life.
The artwork remains itself.
The viewer has changed.
The dialogue begins again.
The Purpose of Art
The highest purpose of art is not decoration.
It is not entertainment alone.
It is not the demonstration of skill.
It is not the production of fashionable objects.
The purpose of art is to preserve and transmit the invisible dimensions of human existence.
Art gives form to what would otherwise disappear.
It preserves perception beyond the moment of perception.
It preserves emotion beyond the life of the person who felt it.
It preserves consciousness beyond the body that contained it.
Through art, an inner life can cross time, language, geography, culture, and mortality.
A masterpiece does not merely represent life.
It extends life.
It continues to perceive.
It continues to feel.
It continues to speak.
The Theory of Living Presence
The Theory of Living Presence is founded upon seven principles:
1. Art is embodied human experience.
A genuine work of art contains more than its material substance.
2. Human attention leaves a trace.
Time, concentration, emotion, and intention become inseparable from the process of creation.
3. Artistic materials are carriers.
Words, sounds, colors, forms, movements, and spaces transmit inner experience through different sensory languages.
4. Art exists through encounter.
The living content of a work is awakened through contact with another consciousness.
5. Great art accumulates meaning.
Every generation, culture, and viewer may enter into a new dialogue with the work.
6. A genuine artwork develops an independent life.
It can speak beyond the intentions, lifetime, and historical circumstances of its creator.
7. The purpose of art is the preservation of the invisible.
Art allows consciousness, memory, feeling, and perception to survive in material form.
Our Definition of Art
Art is Living Presence embodied in matter.
It is human experience given form.
It is memory made visible.
It is emotion preserved beyond the moment in which it was felt.
It is consciousness crossing the boundary of a single life.
An object can be seen.
A work of art can be encountered.
An object remains silent.
A work of art continues the conversation.
Art is the invisible becoming present.
Psy = Art.
Psy = Art is a trademark for all Artworks and Artistic products created by “Museum of Modern Renaissance”, by its co-founders: Nicholas Shaplyko and Ekaterina Sorokina. Here is our concept: Greek letter “Psy” stands for (soul) the subconscious part of our wellbeing which is our art is all about Our art is going straight to subconscious bypassing analytic evaluation and explanation using words. Each piece of art works as a computer program which designed to achieve certain result Very often our mind and body are damaged by stress and illness. Our art restores the flow of energy and harmonizes mental and physical wellbeing. Our art is the art of next generation art of artificial intelligence era.
MYSTICAL REALISM
Writing about art of an artist is like interpreting an abstract idea, it is like trying to express the meaning of something much more nebulous and abstract; it is like trying to materialize in words something that is not material to begin with. And yet we have in front of us very concrete paintings that are quite material. What do they say? Where do they take us? What do they mean? The art of K&K is not representational. It is not a still-life or a portrait or a landscape in the traditional sense. There are landscapes and city views, there are faces and there are objects on those canvases of course but they are not renditions of reality. What unites them all is exactly that — they take the perceiver of this art away from reality in terms of representation of reality. One views an image of a city that is all crooked like reflection of the city in the water and then one realizes that the landscape has an idea that carried the viewer away, an idea that the city we are looking at is a fleeting image distorted by its reflection in the water broken into tiny bits and fleeing into eternity as a mirage. What one sees on the canvas of K& K art is only a doorway to a mystical world beyond the canvas. The images on the canvas are simply invitations to the world beyond, worlds of spiritual energy, a world of struggling deities, and a world of powerful forces tearing apart the human soul. The subject matter of this art therefore is not a landscape or a portrait but rather the idea or a feeling which is evoked by the image on the canvas. A viewer is carried away when confronting this art, carried away to his/ her own interpretation of the images confronted with. For some a sea deity would evoke the spirit of adventure and never-ending voyage like that of Odyssey, for others it would be a sense of boundless energy and affirmation of power, for still others the very same image would generate a feeling of fear and an acute sense of danger. The key to understanding the art of K&K is that it is merely a door to another world, a world of mystical reality created in the mind of the viewer. Thus, the perception and mental realization of the meaning of these images has more to do with the viewer than with the artist. The persona of the artist is manifested by its absence. In other words, the artist does not cry out here I am, here is me, my art, my style, my contribution. In these paintings the artist says: I am not here, investigate your own conscience, and look into your soul that is what I am doing to you as an artist. K&K art is about mysticism or rather mystical experience of a human soul. This art is deeply religious in the sense that its key theme is Man’s relation to God. God is manifested in this art in a variety of guises and forms. God is ever present. But it is not rendered as a concrete image as in Christian art. One will not find representations of God on K&K canvases. We can feel His presence, His power and his support or His wrath but we do not see him. As in Judaism and Islam, God is not to be represented. As in Buddhism God is everywhere, reincarnated a million times. As in Hinduism he appears in the form of many deities and spirits. In K&K art God is everything and yet He not material. God is everywhere and yet the images we see are not representations of God. The secret in this art is in it taking us away from representations to a stream of consciousness that lifts us out of today’s reality into another world a world of our passions, desires, sins, secret cravings, a world of powerful feelings all mingled in bundles love and lust, generosity and stinginess, pride and vanity, gratitude, and self-praise. The images we see are the bundles intertwined into one something that is entangled in our souls. We know we want to be good; we know we strive to God, and yet we also know that we may easily fall and be drawn to something we later shame ourselves for. What is it in the art of K&K that creates this powerful imagery? Why is it penetrating the viewer’s innermost self? Where is the secret of its power? It is because we see ourselves in the images that this art evokes. It is because the artist does not show him/herself in these canvases but rather is opening our subconscious and draws us into an inner discourse about the meaning of life and the presence of God.
PRESENCE OF GOD
K&K art is about mysticism or rather mystical experience of a human soul. This art is deeply religious in sense that its key theme is Man’s relation to God. God is manifested in this art in a variety of guesses and forms. God is ever present. But it is not rendered as concrete image as in Christian art. One will not find. representations of God on K&K canvases. We can feel his presence, his power and his support or his wrath but we do not see him. As in Judaism and Islam, God is not to be represented. As in Buddhism God is everywhere, reincarnated a million times. As in Hinduism he appears in form of many deities and spirits. In K&K art God is everything and jet he is not material. God is everywhere and jet the images we see are not representation of God. The secret in this art is in its taking us away from representations to a stream of consciousness that lifts us out of today’s reality into another world a world of our passions, desire, sins, secret cravings, a world of powerful feelings all mingled in bundles love and lust, generosity and stinginess, pride and vanity, gratitude and self-praise. The images we see are the bundles intertwining into one something that is entangled in our souls. We know we want to be good, we know we strive to God, and jet we also know that we may easily fall and be down to something we later shame ourselves for. What is in the art of K&K that create this powerful imagery? Why it is penetrating the viewer’s innermost self? It is because we see ourselves in the images that this art evokes. It is because the artist does not show him/herself in these canvases but rather is opening our subconscious and draws us into an inner discourse about the meaning of life and the presence of God. The style: How it is possible to describe a style that is unique? We are conditioned to think in comparisons. We are conditioned to define art in terms of schools and periods. We instinctively want to label it because it is easier to identify it and relate to it if it Is categorized and catalogued. And so we say it like Vrubel or it has elements of Klimt. K&K art indeed is like Vrubel’s in the sense that it is mystical and has many motives of fables and fairy tales. It is like Klimt’s in sense that it is often two dimensional and the ornaments are an invitation to the feelings they hide. It is like Malevich and Tatlin of Russian avant-garde in that the forms and shapes we see are merely a cover for the inner meaning to be discovered and interpreted. And jet, despite these obvious similarities, this art is unique. It combines within a harmony that makes it possible for viewer to drift away to another dimension, seeking the enlightenment, seeking the communication with one-self and seeking God and his presence in everything we see and do.
Collection “Emotions”.
Artificial intelligence is a dynamically growing technology today making a big questing mark about who will be the first – chicken or egg?
Who will be the original and who will be secondary soon? Whether or not artificial intelligence will leave behind humans and in the end will get rid of us as rudimental ballast.
We are trying to look inside this dilemma using our artistic tools like inspirations, imagination and intuition. We are artists playing on subconscious field.
We are presenting our new artworks collection, trying to understand how human intelligence works. Like scholars trying to describe the universe using mathematical symbols, we are using our artistic symbolism doing the same. We are trying to describe and even visually depict the universe inside humans, and its links to the cosmos. Scientific ideas very often could be understood by specialists only, but artistic interpretation of it makes it to be understandable, interesting and appreciated by a much wider audience. We believe that our artworks might trigger new ideas in the scientific sense.
Architecture is the frozen Music
Sound and color have similar nature. They both are combinations of different frequencies of vibration. When these combinations reach harmony in the sound world, we can hear the music, the world of colors, we can see the art. It is no surprise that music has seven notes and rainbow has seven colors, same basic elements which are corelate to each other.
All these vibrations trigger our subconscious and emerge various emotions and we are floating through the ocean of magical feelings entering totally different parallel worlds.
Creating this artwork we were trying to depict this process. This transformation of musical instruments into architectural motives though the graphical rhythm symbolized our emotional flow inside us, sharpening our creativity and helping us better understand and appreciate the beautiful and complex world around us.
Oil Pastel
We are creating our oil pastels on black paper, never using any preliminary sketches. We do not mix colors keeping each color pure and separate. We have developed our own unique style by creating very large oil pastels. It could be a large individual artwork, or several pieces connected into one large mural. Behind each composition is the story or philosophical conception which triggers viewer’s imagination and invites it to the dialog with the artwork.
