Gaidamaka, 1992

Marsel Onisko

(Mars Prazdnikov)

Born in Uzhgorod, Ukraine, where he currently lives. The city boasts more than 1,000 years of history, from which it has inherited several medieval cathedrals, unique architectural ensembles from the time of Czechoslovak functionalism, and the longest linden alley in Europe. Its present name has been in use for only about 100 years and, as Wikipedia recounts:

“Uzhgorod was remembered only after the First World War, when Transcarpathia was ceded to Czechoslovakia, and the new government decided to Slavicize the names of cities and villages of the region. Since that time, except for a short period (1938-1944) when Transcarpathia was part of Horthy Hungary, the name Uzhgorod has been officially utilised. The advent of the USSR, which reached the city only after World War II, represented a minuscule part of a far longer historical heritage.”

Despite how the Soviet government imagined itself to be in power, bourgeois culture was constantly leaking out from behind conditional borders – music, literature, and so on. This means that the concrete patches of the USSR on the body of Uzhgorod have always been foreign bodies.

Artist Marcel Onisco does not live far from the building hosting the Faculty of Economics of the local university. In the 1950s, a monumental "Honor Board" was erected in front of this building. Ideally, the board was meant to be one of the common honouring attributes of the phantom of Soviet life. However, since this particular "Honor Board" figured just as one capital letter, a solid one, hanging over the urban landscape, the people started referring to it as the "Melancholy board".

Marcel Onisco has a dream, and next to the "Melancholy board," he envisions one of his creations, Zheka, who looks at the "Melancholy" embodied by the board and, at the same time, as it were, descends from it. Onisco's Zheka is a superhero without super qualities, a material personification of the murky Soviet collective unconscious, and the humanized embodiment of all its longing.

Thus, who is Zheka? According to the author: "Zheka is a human constructor, a collective image. Sometimes I had a chill on my back when I created these works. Do I think the same way as he does in some ways? We all try to hide our inner Zheka deeper – which is good. But it's not always possible because we grew up with him. I would love to get viewers to smile while looking at it. However, this should not come across as an evil satire. I think that radical methods can only cause aggression, and changes within people should take place gradually".

Here, the artist speaks, of course, about the social component of the image. For Marcel, Zheka represents a particular embodiment from the Soviet past, a "tourist" whose participation in life does not exceed observation. However, Zheka cannot be called an observer: he does not look. His eyes are stuck as he stares.

For me, Zheka is a traveller in the time of his own life, equidistant from good and evil, a figure that we see only from the back of his head, "a man in a coat."

Marcel Onisco was born in Uzhgorod, Ukraine. Since 2001, he has been the art director of the international art publication PUNIC BUTTON, which he founded. He is primarily working with graphics and easel painting, and he has been taking part in several international exhibitions since 1996. Marcel's works were presented in personal and collective art projects in the Netherlands, Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, and France.