One of the directions of Grigory Bosenko’s multifaceted creative activity is the New Year greeting engraving, “Pour féliciter,” a personal genre of small-scale graphic art, which translated from French means congratulations on an occasion. The artist’s enthusiasm for miniature graphic art, and above all for the ex libris, inevitably led him to developments and explorations in this intimate and engaging direction of personal graphic art. Participating in the most prestigious international exhibitions and competitions of small-format graphic art, G. Bosenko corresponded and exchanged works with many leading European masters and friends in the art of engraving. Such intensive creative communication with colleagues sometimes requires greater intellectual and professional effort than a series of easel works, for in a small engraving the artist takes stock of his reflections on what was most important in the past year, what, in the artist’s view, will determine the coming year, and how to depict this aphoristically. Having been accepted into a highly professional community, one must improve one’s intellectual and technical mastery, for there is nothing higher than the recognition of another master, a fellow practitioner. The greeting engravings presented in the catalogue, created over a twenty-year period, bear the imprint of a vivid personality and are the fruit of reflections and experiences concerning what is happening and what is eternal. A person with a clearly expressed social position, even in such an intimate genre as PF, he reflects on events that shock or delight him. Hence there is a whole series of etchings marking the landmark events of one year or another: 1987-“For Restoration”; 1987-“The Head of Holofernes”; 1989-“Noah’s Ark”; 1991-“The Tower of Babel”; 1992-“Consensus?” The multilayered and rather difficult-to-perceive narrative-thematic foundation of G. Bosenko’s engravings is dictated by the artist’s desire to “say” much in little, to comprehend what is happening in the context of world history. He reminds us that humanity has repeatedly experienced wars and catastrophes, revolutions and the destruction of empires, the creation and fall of idols, hope for salvation, and the struggle of Good against Evil. All this is present in the greeting engravings sent as a particle of the artist’s soul to colleagues and friends on the occasion of the New Year. Perhaps precisely because these themes are eternal, the characters in the dramas played out by G. Bosenko are dressed in costumes of past eras, while remaining relevant and contemporary images, beyond space and time. In this respect, the latest opuses stand somewhat apart, where the human presence is only implied: 2000-“Autecology”; 2001-“Status Quo.” These works possess remarkable integrity and the utmost laconicism of plot, as a result of which they acquire a monumental character; without loss, they can be transferred to the category of large-format easel graphic art. Another feature of these PFs is their undoubtedly exploratory character in line with contemporary trends in graphic art: (a gravitation toward large formats, the predominance of the formal over the narrative-representational, and the use of new artistic techniques, means, and materials), consonant with the new millennium. In the artist’s own opinion, after passing through the stage of fascination with the formal approach, PF will either return to a narrative-thematic foundation, using aspects of the warmth of greeting, or will exhaust itself and recede into the past.
