Konstantin Kalynovych

God, artists, and magicians have one thing in common. They can make something out of nothing, whether it be pulling a rabbit from an empty hat, painting a landscape known only in the mind--or creating the Cosmos. Russian-Ukrainian Graphic Artist Konstantin Kalynovych plays with this theme in The Great Mystificator, a small format etching, which asture art lovers will immediately recognize as a masterful pastiche of two paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, the early Netherlandish Renaissance master whose surrealistic, visionary style informs Kalynovych's work. In this highly detailed book plate, the contemporary printmaker transforms the peddler in Bosch's painting of The Wayfarer (1510) into a portrait of the artist as master illusionist, toting a wicker basket of visual tricks (where we glimpse one of Bosch's more bizarre creations--the letter-carrying bird man in a tin funnel from his The Temptation of St. Anthony triptych!) The peaked hat in the left hand of the Wayfarer in the original Bosch painting becomes a cornucopia in Kalynovych's graphic variation that is really a "white hole" in the universe, a portal to Paradise open to the saints and their angelic guides. It is an apocalyptic vision taken straight from The Ascent of the Blessed panel in Bosch's oil on wood polyptych, Visions of the Hereafter (1490-1515.) The Wayfarer turned Great Mystificator in the Kalynovych book plate looks out at us with an enigmatic smile, letting us know the secret of this particular "hat trick" will never be revealed. With sleight of hand, the artist has become nothing less than a mediator of salvation. (John Kohan)