ARTIST

Artist statement

Figurative expressionism, the body, and the border between control and impulse.

Artist statement

I work in figurative expressionism. The body in my work is not an object - it’s a carrier of experience: pain, anxiety, desire, shame, strength. I don’t idealize form - I deform it, to show the tension that usually hides beneath the skin.

That’s why the body appears not only on canvas, but also in frame with me. This isn’t a separate story from the painting - it’s a continuation of the same question: what happens to the body when it stops being comfortable and starts being honest.

When I film myself in the studio - in motion, in a vulnerable pose, next to the work - I’m exploring the same thing I explore with the brush: the border between control and impulse, between what’s visible and what’s felt.

My path began in a traditional art school, continued through institutional education - and it was the sense of its limits that pushed me toward independent practice. I grew up in Shadrinsk, outside any established art scene, and that absence of external frameworks forced me to build my own visual language from scratch.

Method

I’ve worked with the mind for over ten years, and the canvas, for me, is an extension of that practice: a way of observing myself through form. Standing in front of a canvas, I never know in advance what will emerge - and that’s the revelation, every time: the chance to discover something that already exists inside but hasn’t yet taken form.

I don’t treat paintings as projects with a deadline. Just as I couldn’t know in advance whether I’d reach the financial and internal goal I’d set myself, I don’t know in advance when a painting will be finished. Regularity matters, but I don’t turn the practice into a product that has to ship on schedule. A painting lives with me for as long as it needs to, because the task it’s solving - fusing the material, the spiritual, and the untamed, living thing that can’t be rushed - has no deadline of its own.

Through painting I go where I wouldn’t dare dive without it - into the mechanics of the psyche, into a depth that would otherwise stay out of reach.

None of my paintings is made in a single pass - all of them have several layers. I never do a preliminary pencil sketch: I go straight into form, carving out volume directly on the canvas, feeling what structure the image demands. That’s part of the method too - trusting the hand and the eye without an intermediate plan.

This is who I am: the one speaking to you about you.

Maybe, for the first time in your life, this deeply.

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