Digital art excites us so much because it speaks to us in the language of our fears and hopes. Digital art is relatively young, and therefore it has not had time to develop a canon, enslaving conventions for artists and repressing boundaries for artists deciding whether or not to enter this zone of artistic creativity and goal-setting. Young art trends are attractive because revolutions, discoveries, and delusions can still occur in them, and bright personalities appear that turn our ideas about “how can we still create art?”.
Contemporary digital artist Vladimir Duban is known in many countries of the world (his works are kept in private collections in Western Europe, Australia, and South America) as a consistent digital postminimalist artist. The roots of his artistic practise stem, not surprisingly, from the musical experiences of the XX–XXI centuries. By the way, in addition to his artistic practise, Vladimir is the founder and editor-in-chief of the “Deep Cuts” online music magazine. It is not by chance that I am focusing on the relationship between Vladimir Duban’s artistic practise and music because, it seems to me, through this comparison it will be easier, more convenient, and clearer to analyse Duban’s art. Duban’s art is compositionocentric. The composition is the defining element, the frame, the dramatic scheme, and the key to understanding the author’s idea.
This makes Duban’s works related to the graphic scores of such influential and outstanding musicians as Radu Malfatti or Jürg Frey. Duban’s laconic compositions show us an example of imaginary simplicity, which can be interpreted as the space of the infinite. Duban’s infinite is freedom without completeness, tightly bound to completeness without freedom.
Duban’s works resemble experiments, exercises, and visionary sketches. Imaginary simplicity turns into an endless space for the spectator’s thinking. The viewer finds themselves in a situation of forced (non-violent) invention of the second plan of the composition. Here, refracted in spectator optics, Duban’s works expand their functional range and become not only referent signs but also symbols, road signs, warning signs, Kantian things-in-themselves, Zen koans, and Schrodinger boxes. Falling under the charm of Vladimir Duban’s works, we are at first fascinated by formal finds, but then we begin to understand that Duban’s art is primarily an accurate and stunning constructive manipulation of audience attention, unprecedented intervention, and overturning cliched conventions of everyday spectator experience.
This is an incredible effect achieved by seemingly ordinary means. This is the great value of Vladimir Duban as a modern digital artist. He works to fulfil a wide range of artistic tasks, from creating unique impressions to rehabilitating the unspeakable and the unthinkable. I strongly recommend that you visit the exhibition by Vladimir Duban if it is held in your city. You will definitely have an amazing experience participating in digital art as a mystery, as a theatrical production, or as a frozen improvisation.
Digital art has never been so fragile, human-made, and full of personal content. This is especially surprising in our era of artificial intelligence, a new era of post-replication, which we have yet to realise, analyse, master, and overcome.
