The artist first employed the appliqué technique back in 2018. At that time, it was a monumental wall panel entitled The Toppling of Perun by Volodymyr the Great, created for the group exhibition Educational Acts at Dragomanov University, which was censored by the administration immediately after the show's opening.
The first sketches for the works that will be on display in the gallery appeared last year. A volunteer he knows sent him a message about the need to raise funds for tourniquets—which prompted the idea to create pieces that could be raffled off for donations. Rather direct images—a stream, blood, fire, water, currents, movement—gradually evolved into figurative and abstract compositions. This reflection on the present from a personal perspective took shape as a series of appliqués and a large folding screen.
While working on the pieces, Kuznetsov noted that in times of war artists often turned to abstraction. “Perhaps,” the artist suggests, “this happens when it becomes impossible to describe reality in words or by familiar visual means. The limits of our language are the limits of our world. At the same time, there are things that are unsayable, even mystical. Turning to abstraction becomes an attempt to understand how working with form and the material’s texture makes it possible to look at the world through a language different from the everyday, and to reveal new meanings in our perception of what surrounds us.”
In his appliqués, as in his murals, Kuznetsov often uses three colours—black, white and red. This stark, almost archetypal palette sharpens the perception of forms and meanings. Works cut from paper and cardboard, contrary to the ephemerality one associates with cut-paper craft, appear weighty and material. Paper here is no arbitrary choice. Its fragility and tremulousness allude to our unstable reality, which may change or go up in flames at any moment. It is a reminder of personal responsibility for the course of the war, which is easily obscured by the notional sense of safety in the rear.