Vitaly Pushnitsky's new project “Ampersand” is about the continuity of painting. Its name contains the word “and”. Everyone knows the symbol, although not everyone remembers its name. The & sign is a logogram originally formed from a combination of the letters "e" and "t", the Latin conjunction "et" (meaning "and").

In his latest works, Vitaly Pushnitsky reflects on this cohesion and endurance, which tend to go unnoticed by us, but which make up the underlying fabric of our logic, judgments and narratives. The artist's contemplations are pliant, constructing inferences like a sequence of visual techniques and assertions. This train of thought is the path to developing a pictorial motif — it is the actual process of painting a canvas.

In this sense, painting posits itself as forward movement, created by the creative energy that this movement is charged with. Such is the closed-loop artistic system of the ampersand — a duration, which prolongs itself in its own prolongation.

The visual story unfolds like an organic ornament growing on top of the layer of paint on the surface of the canvas. Oil is the bonding principle that binds the primed canvas with ribbons cut from canvas, woven into a complex floral pattern.

In the large paintings that summarize the project, their intricacy fills the entire surface of the image. Painting, therefore, turns out not to be a narrative of colors, but a story of canvas on canvas, where oil complements and accentuates this story composed of collage elements molded into a striking relief. Artistic experience finds itself on the border of a one-dimensional illusion of a three-dimensional image, sculpture and visual combinatorics, opening up space to a new artistic freedom and eliminating any differences between figurative and abstract.

Plant metaphors here are both a part of the figurative system and a formative element. The creative process is understood as the growth of canvas on canvas with the active participation of colors.

The metamorphoses of artistic growth provide the continuity of painting that endures as an experience passed on from teacher to student, adopted by the student and enacted in the work of both participants of this dialogue. The teacher's portrait is a lush green bush. This is not the entertaining metamorphoses of Archimboldo, nor is it a metaphorical allegory that hints at the personality of the portrait’s subject. It is an image of bountiful blooming, an apotheosis that bestows its vitality. The teacher is creativity that removes any obstacles in the way. The teacher is a living life that knows no end, that is contagious and continues living in the student.

The student's portrait is also not composed using the collage principle and does not use a system of analogies and comparisons to represent his identity. The student is not a sequel or a victim of the teacher. A hundred years ago, masters of the school of formalism insisted that apprenticeship means to challenge the system established by the teacher, to engage in uncompromising debate in which the student who is carrying on his teacher's work finds his own voice and discovers his convictions. This is the essence of the modernist understanding of tradition, shared by Vitaly Pushnitsky and evident in the student's portrait. The student — a helmet with a lowered visor and an impenetrable bunker — lives by the teacher's generosity, but always makes his own way and sticks to his guns. The student either leaves the teacher, or remains in the unenviable role of the epigone — an eternal student, an apprentice, a child who has not grown past the mirroring stage. This creative rivalry is the life of art, its organic movement forward.

The studio, as an off-screen scene for an audience consuming art, became the starting point of the author's artistic reflections. Having begun to paint the interiors of the workshops in the tondo format, Pushnitsky placed their individual fragments on the canvas, but in the process of working on the project he expanded the painting to large canvases, where spacious rooms appear before the viewer.

In the studios, the image and atmosphere are generally captured, they are often empty, abandoned, but traces of life are always visible in them: canvases, easels, paints, books mixed with simple furniture in the form of sofas, tables and chairs.

Any place becomes a workshop: ordinary apartments, industrial spaces with large windows, even a dense forest - Pushnitsky shows that art has always found a territory for its existence. But almost the artists have changed their "posts", and others have not yet arrived.