INTRODUCTION THE PAST MADE PRESENT by Myroslava M. Mudrak Associate Professor of Art History The Ohio State University   As the end of a millennium fast approaches, a 20th century fin-de-siècle transience pervades contemporary art. In a rapidly changing geopolitical world, artists are faced by the unknown while the achievements of the past squeeze at them from all sides. Can late modernism compete with the achievements of the past, or must it simply satisfy itself by recycling previous styles? What can possibly be gleaned from art long gone that can still produce a fresh viewpoint on current life? With the collapse of communism and totalitarianism there should be plenty to say, it would seem. Made cynical by the Soviet notions of "a society based on the most romantic theory of giving and taking. . .where everybody should love one another, everybody should believe in fraternity and friendship, everybody should give everything they can and take everything they need," featured artist, Valentin Popov, has made his stance in relation to the charade he was forced to live in his native Ukraine by deciding to settle in the United States. In doing so he has built a bridge between the past and the present; between the staunch academic and the unfettered experimental in artistic practice, and devotes his art to addressing the distinction between actuality and delusion. Yet even as new opportunities have allowed the artist to abandon his oppressive circumstances, to explore new tendencies in new contexts, and to pursue his art with a new-found freedom and fresh vitality, the past still intrudes upon his work, but this time, beyond the filter of cynicism to a subtle celebration of the tenable and impermeable principles of his training. The flow of art history, infused in his very being during Popov's thirty-three years of artistic exposure in Ukraine, and his preparation at the Kyiv Institute of Art, incises itself subtly into his work, oozing out in fragments of memory, in glimpses of subconscious codings and recodings in traces of artworks seen, known, digested and literally reproduced. Valentin Popov's work comprises a rich storehouse of absorbed reminiscences and experiences. They can be glimpsed in the historical styles present in his works alongside poetic passages and fragmentary visual references to fleeting recollections of places visited, literature read, classic images studied, analyzed and absorbed. Part of this storehouse was created by an academic training that in the 1970s and 1980s could still only be had in a conservative, rigid capital city isolated from the liberal changes occurring in the rest of the world by intractable political and ideological circumstances. Popov's entire formation was connected with the Kyiv Institute of Art--an institution created in 1922 on the principles established by the first Ukrainian Academy of Art founded in 1918. It was formed as a response to the Revolution in the Russian Empire that brought down the hegemonic rule of the tsars and offered an opportunity for subjugated nations to declare their independence for the first time. This freedom was short-lived, but the institution survived until Ukraine's second declaration of sovereignty in 1991. Today, the Kyiv Institute once again bears the name of Art Academy. The emphasis at the Kyiv Institute was centered on carefully executed pictorealism. Inasmuch as this method was most conducive for the propagation of socialist realist imagery (socialist in content; realist in style), it provided the students with a skilled technique of accurate representation of figure and form. As in Socialist Realism, subject matter is derived from the mundane observable world yet shifted to an idealized environment contrived by ideology. Popov divests himself of this underlying method and, as if taking in the world under a microscope to reveal its truisms, he focuses in (and out) on isolated episodic scenes, depicting commonplace genre themes with precise, keenly observed detailing yet emotionally detaches himself from their content. His work is about sight, sharpening our view, inviting us to look closely, to decipher between painterly illusion, reproduction, and natural material, and to distinguish between fact and fable. As if in a subtle pursuit of truth to reality, Popov seemingly revives the framed vantage of the Renaissance camera obscura, owing a great debt to northern European Baroque painting. With this tradition deeply imbedded in his consciousness by reflective observation of reproductions from an extensive home library of 17th century art, Popov was naturally drawn to the art of Rembrandt, both as graphic artist and painter. As if paying homage to Rembrandt by copying his works and including the letter "R" in his paintings, Popov blended his own training with the Dutch expertise in "the craft of representation." In the emphasis on portraiture appropriated from the Dutch tradition, and in the empirical study of objects as observed fact rather than illusion, Popov seeks not to fool the eye pictorially, but to take stock of the material used in the making of the work; to reveal, rather than obscure the overlapping of material, image, pigment and line, as if to suggest environmental relationships in the creation of the art object. Not only does Popov draw from the pictorial tradition of the Dutch, but he also exercises with great mastery the technique of etching that serves as his expressive medium. Inscriptions play a role in coalescing the interpretation of the work. For Popov, it is the English Romantics who provide a literary setting for his art as if to provoke the artist into contemplating his role in art's labor, in the creation of beauty. To the degree that Popov combines the romantic with the empirical, there is no sentimentality or ethical didactic in his work. Scenes of 19th century English work stations woven into the bold coloration of his painting serve as weak echoes of the regime ruled by the proletariat that he left behind. But rather than create the kind of pictured proverbs of the Dutch, Popov's art enjoys a stronger link with the creation of taxonomies, independent objects and scenes, portraits and letters, observed rationally, at a distance, with firm control over the subject. Art historian Svetlana Alpers describes the Dutch pictorial example by emphasizing "its reflective and passive nature, its selectivity, the need to hold attention by rolling a topic over and over incessantly to consider different aspects of it." Popov seems to adopt this discriminating approach and thus, counterpoising recomposed images of the same visual subject with romantic poetry, he challenges the idea of beauty as an emotional peak and concepts of aesthetics as idealized moments by offering instead a vernacular duplication of observed concrete and tactile pictorial evidence. Furthermore, the decision to abandon canvas and resort to the laborious natural process of making paper can be equilibrated to the almost scientific attention he gives to visual detail, not to mention the sharing in the drudge. Insofar as description of the common is that which brings us closer to knowledge, a certain fussiness in the industrious depiction of bits and pieces of carefully observed nature as indulged in by the Dutch which Popov emulates, aligns him with what Alpers calls their "sensible imagination" that makes "no distinction between man and his makings and Nature and hers." The process of art making and the properties of its material take on elevated and hypercritical significance in Popov's work as he judiciously reveals the authenticity of art making. A vital part of this awareness is made evident by the fibrous texture of his handmade paper superimposed by small geometric pieces of acrylic on which Popov faithfully copies fragments of great masters' works. As is paper is painstakingly compressed in layers, it mimics the layered execution of illusionistic academic painting, but to the degree that he introduces collage elements, the paper absorbs the scraps of reproduced pictures and becomes a palpable trace of a mechanically produced image imbedded in and becoming one with the natural paper as it cures. A thin veneer of wax encases the isolated collage units and preserves the work just as a chemical solution preserves a micro-organism for scrutiny under a microscope. Reinforcing this concept is the depiction of silk-haired biomorphic shapes like capillaries floating through the composition. A fascination with the minutiae of the world and the perspicacious recording of the visual experience as separate, scientifically observed fact, establishes for the artist a parallel search for truth that avoids moralizing and refrains from becoming doctrinaire. So Popov seeks veracity in art by toying with the concept of truth and illusion through a rigorous interplay of diverse materials. As he turns to the fluid surfaces of aluminum as a ground upon which he paints in a style imitating the parallel incise marks of an etching needle, so he also blurs the boundaries between one medium and another, and joins them in a common artistic pursuit. It is hard not to associate the treatment and ethos of Popov's imagery with the fantastic and meticulously handled treatment of Dürer, or more specifically, the hellish creatures of Bosch's fertile mind. But Popov creates his own Foucaultian "bestiary of the imagination." He juxtaposes seemingly incongruous objects in an homologous context, defying as it were, Foucault's description of heteroclitic disorder where things are arranged "in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all." The images, though not necessarily disjunctive, are isolated; yet they maintain a propinquity toward each other through the assemblage of textures and texts, paint drips and calligraphy, and a homogenous palette. If anything, Popov reasserts a cohesive, even if highly contradictory, syntax in his work. He calls his style romantic cynicism, a self-coined term which, he says, "reflects a marriage of polar opposite emotions, feelings that inhabit daily life and that together make a common existence among all human beings." In this regard, the compelling nature and peculiarities of Bosch's art affect Popov's art directly. He gives credit to them in acknowledging the northern Renaissance master through the bold initial of his name stenciled on the surface along with fragmented segments from Bosch's religious paintings. Lettering and inscriptions are ubiquitous in Popov's works. It is a way of bringing together the act of writing and image-making, drawing and painting, description in literary as well as visual terms. Picture and text have always been part of the Ukrainian art historical tradition, from icon painting, primitivist signboards, visual poems of the 16th century revived in the 20th, and culminating, on a populist level, in the slogans and mottoes alongside portraits of Politburo members strung across main squares throughout the Soviet Union when Popov was growing up. Inasmuch as Popov was surrounded by such invasive image texts, it is not unusual that these forms would insinuate themselves into his consciousness, reinforcing, as it were, a passive recollection of stenciled images in the new context of his art. A more active presence on his consciousness was the dominant Baroque influence of his birthplace. Kyiv was always a city attentive to the arts. It flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries as a jewel of Kozak Baroque splendor. Surrounded by the robust architecture of the Baroque, its bold, aggressive spatially variant efflorescent style consolidates the romantic lore of Popov's poetic idiom. The counterpoising of Baroque lines and the discrete juxtaposing of unequal elements of scale, texture, and subject dominate and inspire the compositions of Popov's works. In the genre of a heraldic treatment of emblematic images, Popov translates his free drawing into forms that evoke officialdom (crowns, chalices, and other artifacts of sophisticated religious and secular culture), recalling, as it were, the products of the monastic workshops of ancient Kyiv where high standards of draughtsmanship were modeled on the precision of the Western European graphic tradition. Popov's work emerges from the vestigial evidence of this art and yet responds to the more conceptual, irresolute fallout of Post-Modernism. To attach this phenomenon to Kyiv seems anomalous as much as the city was on the periphery of artistic vanguardism through the Post-Dissident years. But it is undeniable that Popov's painterly foundation was built upon a tradition of excellent draughtsmanship and painterly skill, and provided for a fluid, reciprocal transfer between the delicacy of an etching needle and the exacting elegance of a fine-tipped brush. Whether in graphics or paintings, Popov's is a deft and elegant handling of his specific medium bonded to the very seeds that spawned it, and is rooted in the best that his native Ukrainian culture could develop and nurture despite the stifling circumstances of its development. Distilled through the art of Popov, this culture is still fresh and vital relative to the closing of yet another century, but responsive to the beginning of a new chapter about to unfold.