There is a visible world. There is a world of the invisible. And between them is a painting

Vladimir Davidia (real name Selivanov).

Ukrainian artist, was born in Kyiv in the family of a piano teacher and an aviation engineer.

One of the first initiations into painting was clash with the Germans of the 15th and 16th centuries, such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Buldung Grien.

“The first Eve in my life is the Eve of Hans Baldung Grien.

I was eight, I stared at her for hours, and then the irreparable happened. The one, the indivisible split into two worlds — a woman and painting. Expulsion from Paradise".

This was the first fall into painting. Through an eroticized body, like through a rabbit hole, straight into painting. 

Even then, the child perceived painting precisely as a sovereign world but not as an image of some stories out there. The content of the plots is not interesting. The halcyon game of forms, the sound of colors, the fusion and collision of tones - that's what was interesting. It was similar to how Kandinsky looked at abstract painting. But all this play of figures cleansed of narratives arose against the background of eroticized bodies — Eve, Adam, the crucified Jesus, the Martyr Catherine and others. 

This position has persisted to this day. 

Artist Statement: The artist considers painting as a sovereign world that lives in its own interests and according to its own laws. The canvas is the space of sacred play in this world. Vladimir partially understands the sacred like Georges Bataille — it is a space of religious experiences and eroticism. Religious experience is born from the awareness of one's mortality and all the feelings associated with this awareness. An erotic experience is born from the shame of one's own nakedness. From these two sources is born the irrational, useless, superfluous sovereign act that transformed the primitive Cro-Magnon into Homo Sapiens - the first drawing on stone.

This drawing was not useful, it was completely excessive in relation to the needs of the tribe. And this crazy "first" drawing was an act of creating a parallel world - a world of symbols, fantasy, arts, philosophy and psychopathology. A highly organized organism served as the birth organ of art. And art turned out to be the organ of creation of a new being - man. Painting is the organ of birth and at the same time the world in which the artist is born. And every person in his ideal embodiment is an artist.

Painting is not a way to depict something from life. This is life itself and a separate world. The canvas is a field of sovereign play with all viewers and artists of the world. Starting with the first artist - that dirty and disheveled savage who gave birth to the first picture from the primordial chaos. Therefore, each individual canvas is a world canvas. Each stroke is a philosophical act, a performance in relation to some order. Somewhere he is socratically corrected, somewhere - the one who mocks cynically. A brushstroke is the subject of the game, the embodied intention itself.

In his student years, Vladimir studied the painting of Velasquez, Rembrandt and Hals a lot by copying - both pictorial and in the form of an analytical drawing. The painting of Franz Hals for the first time discovered that the brushstroke can have the quality of sovereignty - to be not only a means, but also a goal.

So, in his creative search, Vladimir came to expressionism - both to classical German and to its more modern forms.

He received his higher art education at the Mykhailo Boichuk Kyiv State Academy of Decorative-Applied Arts and Design. He also studied for a long time with the master of constructive drawing Andrian Babyuk, who is a student and heir to the school of the famous Ukrainian artist and teacher Viktor Zaretsky. Vladimir considers studying with Andrian Pavlovich one of the most important milestones in his creative development, along with Nikolai Prokofievich Semenenko, a teacher and founder of the art lyceum "Biliy Ptakh" and his unique technique that develops imagination.

As his pseudonym, the artist took the name of his paternal great-grandfather.

His name was Levan Davidia. He was a stranger - a stranger from the Caucasus mountains in the steppe and settled in the former Cossack stanitsa (settlement). Who he was and where exactly he came from no one knew. It is only known that he served somewhere else  from time immemorial and fought on some fronts, but it is not known exactly where. Among the inhabitants of the village, he had authority as a bookish person. He had some book, they say, in ancient Aramaic. No one could read it. Only he read it and spoke prophecies about local lands. They say that everything he said came true, except for one thing - the construction of a bridge across the river. As it turned out later, the bridge project was created in this place. But before the planned construction date, historical changes took place in the world, the Soviet world began to disintegrate and the bridge project was forgotten. After his death, the book disappeared as mysteriously (apparently, it was stolen) as he appeared in the village. All that remained was the image of a stranger who came from distant mountains to the polis, a book full of those subjects that were depicted in an album of German paintings of the 15th century, the magical sound of the ancient Aramaic language, an unfinished bridge and a name.

Now, when the war is going on in Ukraine, Vladimir continues to comprehend expressionism and the principle of performativity in the arts, remembering both Artaud, who prophesied about the emergence of fascism, and Jerzy Grotowski with his liberating practices and rituals, and Meister Eckhart with his idea of the kingdom of thought , and about Mikhail Bulgakov with his Master, Margarita and the eternal tragedy of the meeting of the creator with the ruler, love with power, and about Mikhail Vrubel, who freely unfolded the composition from anywhere, and about Sergei Parajanov, who came from the Caucasus mountains, the Ukrainian Dionysus, whose creative rampage one of the most terrible totalitarian systems could not break, and about all the expressionist brothers who were crucified on the pillory of the witty exhibition "Degenerate Art" in 1937.

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