He has already been recognized and earned a place in the recent Generations USA at the Pinchuk Art Center. He has traveled further than this, with numerous exhibitions in Berlin, Vienna, Poland, Sweden, Moscow and New York. Currently Kadan's works sell for $US 4,000 to $US 6,000 each.
At this moment he is in Prato, Italy working on a mural. His work is about action and ideas and he has plans to voice his aspirations and those of other artists and hold forums for challenging dialogue.
"There are now more important issues to do with contemporary art - maybe I can assist and create more public discourse," Kadan said in an interview for the Observer.
Kadan is very vocal about the new materialism he sees everywhere, particularly in his own country. "Do we need this liberal capitalist system? …I see only fakes," he says. "We have to know what it is all about and what we want to speak about: to analyze all social relations. A copy without sense or function is useless. Abstract art is important in finding the answers and can make social relations better. It is just the beginning of the freeing of the mind. I don't believe in messages, I believe in visions. I see conformity as the imprisoning of people's will."
The young artist has certainly landed on his feet for, at just 24 years of age, he has achieved a lot on his growing resume. He was invited to attend the Moscow Biennale recently through the Russian curator Victor Misiane.
"I want to be an artist who deals with real problems, not to be a decorator of synthetics," he says. Kadan has another side to his character: he is part of a group of artists who call themselves the Revolutionary Experimental Space (or R.E.P) - a group of artists who came together in 2006, to make objects and art as a collective.
This group awakens the public awareness to politics and social issues. REP is a quiet group that uses art as a means of investigating and experimenting, dealing with the public appeal, performing in public spaces using video and installations. Their recent exhibition during April at the CCA dealt with many rising issues.
Kadan enjoys new media, and its freeing of the mind. He mentions inspiration from artists Stelarc, Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys amongst others and his admiration of them.
"Of course Kasimir Malevych comes into this, with no hesitation," says Kadan, "as an artist of the avant garde. These artists all make art that appeals to society and has a message."
When I asked Kadan if he had been to America, he replied emphatically, "No!" But he goes there through his television.
"I paint from my TV set."
His virtual world is very strong, using the Internet to find out about art ideas. He says he has found out more about contemporary art through this medium and through talking with other artists than at art school. He is scathing about the traditional art establishment that is put on pedestals and conforms to the ideology of the day. He says he learned to draw and paint at the academy in a very traditional way and now he will take this into creating his own art.
Regarding his own work, he enjoys paint and working with it. He loves painting because it extends him; it is immediate. All work is generally untitled and is large, often over 2 meters in dimension, particularly his series of works displaying the apocalyptic paintings of mushroom clouds and buildings.
In this series of works, Kadan is not targeting Sept 11th but using this image to conjure fear and imminent danger, an apocalyptic message in our everyday lives.
His paintings describe the conflict of the world, an amorphous danger. The atomic mushrooms that spiral and convolute in baroque formations are symbolic of imminent danger. "I want these works to be silent." When there are people there are always victims in this context. I don't want the explosions to have any ethical aspect. Kadan wants us to remove ourselves from specific events and view the works as descriptions of impending doom, warning us of imminent danger.
The subtle shades of gray and soft blue evoke some beauty. These are more like ghostly apparitions that are warning us. The tonality of the works read like a newsreel or news footage. "Danger is something that is hard to understand. It is so easy to formalize danger. It is easy to say people are crazy but it is harder to say that perhaps it is people formalizing some power over the situation."
I mentioned the Spanish painter, Goya's paintings about doom and how he too tried to make sense through his painting of the visual horror of his world. Kadan agrees that as an artist he seeks to express his world through paint and to give his work a voice. News footage photography has already said enough about disasters but an artist digests these images, and then paints these impressions that have become absorbed in his own mind. Kadan's technique is one of dripping the paint so that it flows down in a screen-like effect to the base of the canvas. He layers the surface with diluted paint, to create transparency that falls like a shower.
Kadan actually describes painting and the beauty of a Monet in the surface technique of painting…a sort of watery harmony. Kadan is adamant that his work is deeper and should be viewed beyond that surface layer or layers of paint. "I feel that under the surface there is something more, my TV set shows me." He sees repression of his beliefs and making someone believe against their will, as violent. "I am not a prisoner of convention," he added.
Kadan's work suggests a world we really have little control over and are, as human beings, susceptible and vulnerable outside our own imaginations.
Kadan has the last word when he says that we can all change things; like solidarity, like what happened with the Orange revolution, it was public and populist.
"I find I now know how to deal with my private territory and I feel I don't need to be part of the society and an institution. I feel more about communities and to create some level of thinking about art. There is more to art than attractive representation."
|
