In Search of Lost Dreams

And each my picture is a laboratory work.

And just like a laboratory assistant, I never know how it will end.

Garik Goryany

Garik Goryany uses quite complex techniques requiring from the artist not only the skill of the painter, but also the skills of sculpting, carver, and skills of working with metal. Iron, wood, oil, coal... In the overall score, each element plays its part, each has its own role.

As a rule, in the assemblage the metals play the main role. In the paintings of Goryany, we observe an alchemical process, as a result of which cosmic energy, concentrated in black iron as the first phase of metallic matter, turns into the sensual world of primitive man. At the same time the colored alloys take on the fine-material energy, symbolizing the human transition from the wild to the civilized, pre-history to history, from pre-life to life.

Gary Goryany. "Habitat 2".

However, in the relief painting the wood comes to the fore. Unlike the artificial metal, a natural wood with its periodic revival symbolizes the infinitely renewed living Cosmos. Representing the life order, it connects up and down - the divine forces hidden from our eyes above, and those everyday processes that occur here on Earth.

Gary Goryany. "Holy letters".

Artist’s Palette

Using oil, Goryany rarely resorts to bright colors, preferring umber, ocher, and other dull natural colors.

Only tropical nature creates a furious, carnival riot of colors. For us, residents of middle latitudes, such a motley palette looks unnatural. However, a rich gamut can be quite acceptable, if only the colors are laid out as skillfully as in nature. Moreover, all the color cheers up very well. I have bright yellow glasses, which I called amusing. In any, even the gloomiest I see a bright, sunny day through these glasses. Therefore, to all who have a lot of bright colors in stock, I feed the kindest feelings. But... I myself am attracted by another palette: these are earthy, Rembrant colors; the pigments based on the mineral nature.

If I need red I don’t use cadmium, and I take Indian red. If I need yellow, I will use ocher. Greens are only grassy. Spring, juicy, too green color is not suitable in its natural form even for realistic landscapes: grass, leaves bear the influence of air, weather, and they are still withered, most likely going to green. Pure greens are only in a tube.

Gary Goryany. "Astrology and Kabbalah. Joseph and his brothers".

Astrology and Kabbalah

The outlines of human bodies, animals and insects, plant elements, the sacred letters of the Hebrew alphabet, spirals and labyrinths intertwine and create fascinating pictorial spaces.

In his astrological series, Garik Goryany, as probably few others, was able to formulate the most important things for understanding man, humanity, and the world.

This is an attempt to illustrate some phenomena of human thought about his nature, about the history of religion, about the history of being. My task was to show that there is something wider than our understanding of things and deeds, to which we have obeyed since childhood.

Gary Goryany. "Initially".

Who is the Addressee?

These works by Goryany are not intended for a wide gallery display. They are for a targeted demonstration in a certain place.

I show them where I think it is suitable. This is most often a society where I can meet like-minded people, and we will have a great time.

As a follower of Kabbalah, Goryany is convinced that the only authentic reality is one’s own consciousness, and the world around is not at all what we see it, or it does not exist at all. In other words, the most important ability of a person is inner contemplation, i.e. focusing on his own feelings. Often, such a concentration requires a certain environment or physical object.

An example of such meditation may be the rite of the shamans, the costumes of the Rosicrucians, or the decoration of an Orthodox church. At a certain moment, unexpectedly for myself, I heard that my paintings could also be adapted for concentration, although I never even thought about it when I created them.

Gary Goryany. "In search of the mechanisms of meditation 1".

For the first time Garik learned about it in Sweden during the preparation for the exhibition in Gothenburg. During this period, the artist closely communicated with the participants of the Scandinavian Shamanic Arts Center, and his work attracted their attention.

They took my paintings, set in front of them and trained. It was very nice and interesting for me.

Later, these works by Goryany were positively perceived in the society of Rudolf Steiner in New York and in the Manhattan Kabbalistic Center of Madonna.

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Goryany again and again tells us with each of his work: the world is controlled by a point, a line, a circle. We find these signs in his paintings and read them with the mind or with the intuition. But the most active, brighter, more accessible, you can illustrate the infinite, invisible, transcendental with the help of spirals and mazes, in which there is no beginning and no end.

Gary Goryany. "Spirals".

There is no guarantee that we all read these messages in the same way, correctly decipher the information encoded by the author. Well, it is not necessary. Everyone finds what he should. The artist himself is not going to explain something to the viewer. There is no need in tips because his paintings are not a manifesto, not a constitution, not enlightenment. He just shares his questions with us.

Once I tried to tell something, but it turned out that people saw something completely different and understood everything completely differently. Well, they have the right. Ultimately, it’s just a painting, a fictional image, surrealism.

Is It Faith or Knowledge?

Goryany was 25 years old when Kabbalah provoked the awakening of the spirituality hidden in him. Is he a believer? Of course he is. But is he religious?

Faith is not a religion, but rather my character trait. It can be said that I am a religiously moderately oriented or even not oriented person, since I regard any religious movement as an interesting product for reflection, nothing more. As for Kabbalah, it is more a science than a religion. And if it is a religion then it is interesting and clever. Unlike all others, it is the only one that gives rise and opportunity to develop.

Therefore, the characters of the Old Testament scenes present in the painting of Goryany are not an appeal to a higher power in its limited religious understanding, but, above all, a story about the spiritual growth of the person himself. For the Creator is within us.

Gary Goryany. "The immanence of transcendence".

Not a single living creature - neither fish, nor bird, nor beast - can change anything in nature; they live within the framework of their roles. All zebras of the world are alike. A beehive is just a box with bees swarming in it, which from one million of the years to another million of the years do the same thing. But where does nature end and divine begin? Ii is in the man. Unlike identical zebras, we are all different and transform the world in different ways. The Creator lives in us so that we remember that we are human.

Gary Goryany. "Point of secret knowledge on the Tree of Life".

Chaos and Cyberculture in the Information Age

No matter how close his self-developed artistic style, in which the entire astrological series was made, to Goryany, Garik decided not to remain only in it.

From carefully thought-out plots with easily readable images of anthropomorphic creatures, Goryany gradually moves on to abstraction as the highest manifestation of conceptual generalization. However, Kabbalah remains with him, it stands behind the door, lurking in the corners of the workshop, and when the artist picks up a brush, it leaves the corners and dictates to the master what he has to tell the world.

It is impossible to convey this with the help of some conclusions or your own imagination; you lose the connection with the reality and just do it.

Gary Goryany. "Managed chaos".

By saying this, the artist has in mind the phenomenon of automatic writing. Unconscious, spontaneous, it is a kind of downloading.

This download is influenced by the task. In my pictures there are fragments for which it was worth being born, in general, to come to this world. They have fallen down from somewhere, and I don’t even know to whom I pass them.

Gary Goryany. "Imprints 1".

Searching for the Lost

In different periods of creativity, the artist called his meditative-metaphysical pictures differently, but the viewer can come up with his own names for them. For example, “Searching for the Lost Dreams”, or “In Search of Pre-Life”.

Was the world formed from a point? From the clustered small motes? Or did the gods come from somewhere in their golden chariots? What is the Earth stays on - on three whales, on three pillars, or maybe on the Holy Trinity? And the life where we are? If it exists, then there was a pre-life, wasn’t it?

Gary Goryany. "Between visible and invisible 1".

And in this pre-life something had to happen, to separate from chaos, to thicken, to meow, to peep, some levers had to be turned on... In that case, we probably should speak about the search for the lost memory - the million-year-old memory of humanity about the birth of the world. Or maybe the whole thing is in the lost imagination? After all, in childhood we all had it, but closer to maturity, it slowly got lost... Or does it only seem like this?

We often talk about the power of sight, will, thought, spirit, but there is another, equally important force; it is imagination. Having it, we can create everything else by ourselves. Show us the tail and we’ll draw the dog, let us catch the smell and we will understand what dish it is.

Gary Goryany. "Fabric of the Universum 1".

Questions without the Answers

Moisture has been injected into the soil. Lightning struck the ground. Information has flowed into someone’s raw virgin brain. Everything tends to order. The system has certain symmetry properties; it is subject to vibrations, invisible rhythms, like a heart beating inside us, like a pulsating brain. 

Gary Goryany. "Kabbalah and cosmocentrism".

But what kind of power lies in the fact that our cells are renewed, and the trees from year to year come to life and bear fruit? What makes the embryo move and develop in a certain direction? After all, at first all are alike - you cannot tell the fetus of a cat from a dog, a giraffe from a man... All these are questions that have no answer. But the artist does not even try to look for them. On the contrary, he sees his mission in asking questions.

Gary Goryany. "The territory of guesswork 2".

Who is the man - the master of life or an obedient slave? What is God, higher powers, or is it just our changing consciousness? And what is visual art, genius, freedom? It is impossible to fully comprehend these concepts.

The more pencils you draw to the end and the more brushes you paint out, the more clearly you realize that you are alone with something incomprehensible to you. Therefore, each of my pictures is a laboratory work, and as a laboratory technician I never know how it will end.

Yes, by and large, in the paintings of Goryany and there is no end; you can always add some kind of touch. On them, as on the planets, there is enough space for everything.

Gary Goryany. "In search of the Absolute".