STILL INTERVAL
by 
IGOR BARDYKIN


The
Open
Universe



A Study of Sound, Color, Memory, and Light


The Open Universe explores the space between sound and image, where musical relationships are translated into colour, surface, memory, and light.
Developed from my background as a classically trained pianist and composer, the work extends musical thinking into painting through a personal chromatic system in which notes, intervals, and harmonic relationships become visual structures.
Each painting is constructed slowly through repeated layers of acrylic, translucent glazing, sanding, removal, and hand polishing. Colour is treated not as decoration or representation, but as a form of resonance—something accumulated over time, altered by light, and experienced through duration.
Many works contain more than one hundred individual layers. Pigments are built, obscured, exposed, and rebuilt, allowing earlier states of the painting to remain physically present beneath the visible surface. The resulting depth is not an illusion applied to the image, but a material record of time and transformation.
Still Interval refers to the moment after sound has disappeared but continues to exist internally: as memory, tension, expectation, or afterimage. The paintings inhabit that suspended space, where sound becomes colour and colour begins to behave like memory.

About


Igor Bardykin is a Los Angeles–based artist, composer, and pianist working between sound, colour, light, and perception.
Since childhood, he has perceived musical notes through colour. A note was never only a sound — it carried a colour, a temperature, a texture, and a particular sense of space. Long before these relationships became part of his visual practice, they were simply the way he experienced music.
Bardykin grew up between several artistic disciplines. He studied classical music, trained in ballet, and attended art school, developing an early relationship with drawing, painting, movement, and form. He later continued his musical education as a classical pianist at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Over time, these disciplines began to return to one another. Sound suggested movement. Colour carried tension. Silence had depth.
His current visual practice grows from The Open Universe, a personal system in which each of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale corresponds to a specific colour. The system is rooted in his own perception of sound, developed from colour associations he has experienced since childhood.
For Bardykin, these relationships are not abstract. F is brown. Its sound feels warm, soft, and calm. To him, it carries something almost wooden — not as a metaphor added afterwards, but as an immediate quality of the note itself. Other notes hold their own colours, temperatures, tensions, and emotional weight.
From this system, Bardykin develops an expanding body of works he calls Intervals. Each series explores the relationship between notes differently. Some intervals are optical, shifting with light and viewing angle. Some become Deep Intervals, where colour appears to recede beneath the surface and open into internal space. Others may become more physical and material — including works in which the perceived character of a note begins to shape the material itself.
The paintings are built through multiple layers of acrylic, fluorescent pigment, translucent veils, airbrushed colour, and hand-polished surfaces. Colours meet, separate, disappear, and return. A flat plane may appear to open inward; a boundary may shift as the viewer moves; light may reveal relationships that a photograph cannot fully hold.
For Bardykin, painting is not a departure from music. It is another way of listening.
His practice continues to evolve across painting, composition, performance, and sound. His music has been performed internationally, and includes an original composition created for Mother of Evolution, part of Mother of Creation by Madonna and Beeple.
The Open Universe remains an evolving system rather than a fixed conclusion. Future works will continue to explore intervals through optical depth, transparency, reflection, material, and physical space — allowing the same musical relationships to take different visual forms. A note may become colour, but it may also suggest surface, weight, temperature, or material. What begins in sound can continue as light, depth, wood, reflection, or space.