Victor Kuzmenko

Ontological Painting – Conceptual Foundations

This text presents a conceptual synthesis of the artistic research that defines and examines the theoretical foundations of Ontological Painting.

My concept of Ontological Painting emerged and gradually evolved from the conceptual territory opened by Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and his reflections on the “zero degree of form” and the “zero degree of space,” as well as from Wassily Kandinsky’s seminal essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, particularly his ideas on non-narrative painting and the relationship between colour and form.

In a similar spirit, the German avant-garde group ZERO, while maintaining a dialogue with the historical avant-garde of the 1920s, introduced at the end of the 1950s a new artistic vision centred on space, time, and a cosmological understanding of existence. For the artists of ZERO, the notion of zero represented the point of origin—a moment of renewal, regeneration, and the possibility of a new beginning in art.

During the same period, the concept of the “zero point” became a subject of philosophical inquiry for thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Roland Barthes. The group’s manifesto, ZERO is Silence. ZERO is the Beginning., redefined zero not as a symbol of nihilism, but as the fertile void from which new artistic possibilities emerge.

Alongside the German movement, several parallel initiatives appeared, including Gutai in Japan, Nul in the Netherlands, Nouveaux Réalistes in France, and Azimut in Italy. These groups maintained close intellectual exchanges with artists such as Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Mark Rothko, and Piero Manzoni, united by a shared ambition to move beyond Abstract Expressionism and to explore new conceptions of image, perception, and consciousness.

My own empirical research into Ontological Painting has continued for more than three decades. It began in the late 1980s, when I consciously shifted from drawing to painting with the intention of creating works concerned not with everyday reality, but with Being itself.

This artistic direction naturally led to ontology—the philosophical discipline devoted to the study of Being and the fundamental principles of existence. Ontology investigates the essential structures of reality, the various modes of existence, the relationship between matter and spirit, and the categories of space, time, and movement. Since ontology is fundamentally concerned with the nature of Being, the visual and material expression of these inquiries within my artistic practice came to be defined as Ontological Painting.

Material, Form, and Visual Language in Ontological Painting

In the early stages of developing its visual language, I explored various strategies of formal reduction. At times, the chromatic range was diminished almost to monochrome; at others, tones of bronze or aluminium were introduced into the pictorial surface, while in certain works the brushstroke itself—through variations in scale, rhythm, and density—became the primary bearer of visual meaning.

Over time, it became evident that the representation of ontological concepts required the use of primordial materials directly associated with the origins of matter: earth, sand, clay, finely ground shells, graphite, and metallic powders. The incorporation of these natural elements gives the paintings an austere visual presence, free from decorative excess and chromatic seduction—an austerity that mirrors the discipline and concentration of the spirit itself.

For this reason, Ontological Paintings were, for many years, created without oil paint and with only a restrained use of colour in its conventional sense. Their purpose is not to evoke emotional responses through the representation of the visible world, nor to imitate external reality, but to convey spiritual perception beyond the emotional experiences generated by material existence.

At a later stage in the evolution of this artistic practice, colour gradually reappears. It is introduced not as a descriptive or decorative device, but as a material element integrated into the same structural logic as earth, graphite, metallic powders, and the other physical components that constitute the work.

Although Ontological Paintings do not rely upon a rigid compositional structure, they nevertheless generate what might be described as a momentary composition, formed in the instant of encounter between the viewer and the work. During perception, the eye intuitively identifies the suggestion of an object that appears recognisable while remaining fundamentally indeterminate. I define this phenomenon as the Perceptual Object, one of the essential concepts underlying Ontological Painting.

The Perceptual Object may emerge as a chance configuration, an impossible object, or an undefined presence without ever resolving into a fixed identity. It is precisely this ambiguity that intensifies the psychological and spiritual tension of the image. In certain works, I also incorporate recognisable materials, such as natural rope, whose presence prevents the paintings from being understood as purely abstract, positioning them instead within a space suspended between abstraction and reference.

Microcosm, Macrocosm, and the Spiritual Experience of the Image

One of the fundamental premises of Ontological Painting is the understanding that the infinitely vast cannot exist independently of the infinitely small. This idea gave rise to a pictorial language capable of generating two simultaneous modes of perception. The forms depicted may be understood as immense cosmic structures—galaxies, universes, or spatial configurations—or, equally, as elements of the microscopic world: cells, atoms, nuclei, elementary particles, and the fundamental constituents of matter.

The image therefore oscillates between order and chaos, between structure and becoming, without ever resolving into a single interpretation. The materials employed and the particulate organisation of the pictorial surface allow these two perceptual scales to coexist, making it impossible to determine whether one is contemplating a galactic universe or matter observed through a microscope. This ambiguity opens the work to multiple readings and invites reflection upon the underlying unity of all levels of existence.

Within Ontological Painting, narrative is consciously abandoned. The image does not seek to tell a story, illustrate an event, or evoke poetic realism or emotional responses rooted in material reality. It has neither an absolute orientation nor a privileged point of view, while painterliness in its conventional sense is deliberately reduced to what is conceptually essential. Every visual element exists solely by virtue of its necessity within the work’s conceptual structure.

Every new direction in painting demands the emergence of a new visual language. Ontological Painting seeks to investigate dimensions of spiritual existence that remain largely unexplored, requiring a correspondingly new plastic vocabulary capable of articulating these realities.

The meaning of an Ontological Painting is not constructed through narrative interpretation but is perceived almost instantaneously, through a sequence of suprasensory impressions and subtle energetic exchanges between the viewer and the work. These brief moments of encounter awaken previously unrecognised dimensions of consciousness, allowing the latent life of the spirit to become perceptible beyond the limits of ordinary experience.