Artist statement

In the art history staple “On the Marionette Theatre” by Heinrich von Kleist, the idea of effortless grace intrinsic to innocence is confronted with stiffness of self-awareness, that can only be overcome by transcending consciousness.

The struggle to achieve that quality took me on a creative journey—from photorealism to more expressive work, to non-objective art, and all the way to the “extreme” of questioning the medium itself by recognizing and appreciating the same aesthetic qualities in undeliberate or non-artist artifacts. I associate this elusive effortlessness with a certain degree of ordered chaos—entropy—which is very hard to reproduce once you’ve lost your “innocence” through indoctrination into the “real world” of tight schedules and routines, once you’ve become rigid and trained—habituated.

Located on the opposite sides of “mastery” spectrum, children’s drawings and virtuoso artworks share one quality: call it unapologetic confidence, or effortlessness, or playfulness, but this trait often stems from the lack of intent—or rather, the lack of pressure to realize a certain expectation or idea. Children just enjoy the process, while the master painters have transcended this pressure, doubt, or self-consciousness. In any case, virtuosity is a quality of performance, where a step towards freeing ourselves from the pressure to produce an object, focusing on the process—the “now”—not trying or making, but doing, offers a chance to achieve this ever-eluding quality.

For me, this is most evident in buffing—the process of overpainting graffiti by the communal services. I find it fascinating on two levels: first, by treating graffiti as an act of resistance to capitalist branding and urbanism; and second, as a dialogical process between graffiti artists and the city. It can be regarded as a trace of city’s own agency—the totality of city planning and clean walls provokes its inhabitants to act by spray-painting it with tags and graffiti, which in turn forces the city to react by covering them up with abstract shapes. Neither strive to produce an artwork, yet the resulting images often have that striking “drunken master” elegance.

Gradual incorporation of this dialogical approach into my work started with a desire to reproduce the industrial or studio aesthetics, highlighting the relationship between chaos and order—the undeliberate and seemingly hectic nature of production and studio floors' imagery, which is paradoxically the direct result of calculated routines and schedules—­illustrating the agency of the environment itself. That made me in turn seek help from other artists, asking them to erode my input by “vandalizing” my paintings with tags, and me reacting by buffing theirs, ending up with a weird symbiotic soup of unrecognizable artistic voices.

My interest in industrial environments comes from years of day jobs in warehouses and factories. Together with the background in traditional art, this experience gives me a good base and perspective to critically approach the painting medium, while the combination with my current art mediation and art history studies provides a theoretical support for a symbolic confrontation with the institutionalized art world, questioning the notions of the art-work binary, authorship, agency, artist-genius myth, the validity of painting as a contemporary art medium and the autonomy of art.

In my work outside painting I address a wide range of issues—from political oppression and war, to religion, corporate culture and capitalism—working with different media and moving into direction of interactive, collaborative and socially engaged art.