The Giant

Text by Oleksandr Soloviov

Artem Humilevskiy is a neophyte of photography. He started photographing quite recently, in 2019, and his first attempts to master this medium were of a commercial nature. He got involved in photography as an art that fits into the system of contemporary art after a brief study at MYPH photography school in Mykolaiv and meeting its leader and teacher, Sergey Melnitchenko. Melnitchenko’s projects (‘Schwarzenegger – my idol’, ‘Young and free?’) dealt, among other things, with the problem of corporeality. It was an irony of masculine athleticism in the first case and a special photo session of some sort of men’s club in the natural environment in the latter. But in both cases, these were not the exercises in the search for body plasticity in the traditional nude photography genre.

Body Landscape Self-portraiture

In Humilevskiy’s first project after this school, The Giant, the question of the body also takes a prominent place. It is the core of the curatorial concept and text. In The Giant, too, it is not just a fixation on ordinary male nudity but an extreme body that fits into different types of spaces: closed and open, interior and landscape. The closeness of the first images in the project was due to the Covid restrictions. Disconnection, the collapse of established communication links, isolation and loneliness — all this became a motivating reason to pick up a camera and plunge into self-reflection in these forcibly abnormal and harsh conditions. As the regime loosened, the photographer’s lens naturally opened the spatial horizons of studying his non-trivial body. As a result, all this turned into a kind of adventure, a journey of the body; of the Great Body. The author was able to turn the mise-en-scène narrative into the mythological realm, into a story about the lives of some fabled giants.

If you try to define the project’s genre, it will be difficult because of its hybridity and blurriness. In essence, this is a self-portrait (mainly full- or half-length), set in an environment, including a landscape. The project’s unique quality is its everydayness. Due to this diffuseness, the study of the inner world acquires equal importance with the visual outline and construct of the outer world. The fusion, not the opposition, of these worlds gives The Giant harmonious naturalness, integrity, and imaginative appeal.

In his interview with the Kyiv-based Bird in Flight media, Humilevskiy emphasised the key point: ‘In the photographs, I am always naked, because for me the body is always about sincerity and openness, and I want to be as honest as possible with the viewer.’ Attitudes towards the naked body, say, in ancient times (there is even such a concept among art historians – ‘heroic nudity of a mature man’), or in our era of total and flattering selfies, Instagram exhibitionism, unrestrained demonstration of fitness beauty, TV shows like ‘I’m ashamed of my body’, ‘Weighed and happy’, of course, are very different. Today it is difficult to surprise someone, to stun someone in this bodily flow. And our author is saved because he does not strive for this, but, as the quote above shows, tries to be sincere and honest. This somewhat ‘Rabelaisian’ approach gives rise to self-irony and a state of ‘unarmed nakedness’, as the German journalist Peter-Matthias Gaede aptly called it, which can attract the viewer’s attention and evoke greater interest, paradoxically, through its simplicity, unpretentiousness, and organicity. At the same time, it does so without the help of accompanying bodily sexuality. In Humilevskiy’s project, it is absent; the question of the body is exhausted by the body as such. An experienced viewer is more likely to have connotations from the history of art, including the modern one, where the line of the hyperbolised body form is prominently revealed: the Flemish Rubens and Jordaens, the Colombian Botero, the British Lucien Freud, and the Ukrainian Lesya Khomenko, with her picturesque cycle ‘Giants’.

In Humilevsky’s Giant, the large form prevails. The figures seem to be sculptural, pointedly voluminous. Their relief is, as it were, embedded in the 2D picture. In the series, which includes more than a hundred subjects, different approaches to on-location shooting are apparent. There are casual, even spontaneous ones and more structured, theatrically excessive ones. The colour scheme also differs: from a more restrained one, based on tighter colour combinations, to a brighter and more colourful one. In the project, despite the presence of a monohero, there is no monotony, as it unexpectedly combines comedy and sadness, naivety and seriousness, logical justification and absurdity.

Another distinctive feature of the project is its keenly felt involvement in events in Ukraine; the spirit of the times is conveyed with great insight. And it’s not even about direct patriotism, when, let’s say, the national flag colours are used in several photographs, but about the suspense, anxious anticipation, and foreboding that literally permeates the mood of the series. The fact that the author finished his project as soon as a full-scale invasion began is quite natural. The war has strongly influenced the project’s future, inevitably changing and adding new intonations to its current perception.

Images – courtesy of the artist

The article has been written by Oleksandr Soloviov on the occasion of an online exhibition, ‘The Giant’ at BAROQUE Gallery, accessible from phones and tablets at the link

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Oleksandr Soloviov

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Oleksandr Soloviov is a curator, art historian, and participant of ‘Paris Commune’ squat — the legendary place and phenomenon in Ukrainian art history that has become a centre of contemporary art development in the 1990s.

For several years (with a break), he was a member of the Supervisory Board of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv and Odesa. From the beginning of 2003 to the middle of 2010, he worked with Victor Pinchuk’s foundation ‘Contemporary Art in Ukraine’ and then at PinchukArtCentre.

In recent years, Soloviov worked as a curator of contemporary art projects at Mystetskyi Arsenal — the largest public art institution in Ukraine. He was the curator of the Ukrainian Pavilions at the 50th, 52nd and 55th Venice Biennale.