A project of the Municipal Gallery / Kharkiv and Karas Gallery / Kyiv

video screening on May 5 at 20:00

Kherson graphic artist Stas Volyazlovskyi (born 1971), laureate of the K. Malevich Award (2010, Poland), participant in more than 20 group and 5 solo prestigious international exhibitions and biennales of contemporary art, including “ART MOSCOW,” “ARMORY SHOW” in New York, “ARTISSIMA” in Milan, “ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH” in Miami, and perhaps the largest elite “FRIEZE ART FAIR” in London, has long been widely known as the author of such an original (and for some, marginal) movement of Ukrainian contemporary art as “chanson art.”

Intersecting in semantics and creative impulses, but not in genesis, with “art brut” (“raw art”), this art gravitates more toward the Russian lubok, folk imagery, toilet graffiti, and tattoo emblems, developing into an independent creative statement that goes far beyond all the aforementioned sources of artistic creation.

Stas is also not a “newcomer” to Kharkiv, since the attentive viewer has seen his works in the exhibition performances of the SOSka group and is familiar with Stas’s pillows and sheets from the exhibition of the “TOTEM” group: “Steppe… Yes! Steppe. Around!”, presented at the Municipal Gallery in 2007. In 2014, Stas was one of the jury members and workshop masters of the NonStopMedia-VII festival.

For the 20th anniversary of MG, Stas prepared the project “Libertage-II” (first shown at KARAS GALLERY (Kyiv) in December 2015, works from the collection of the project “A4. Ballpoint Pen”), with a presentation of the album “A 4. Ballpoint” and a video screening.

Executed in a spontaneous drawing technique and addressing the current cultural experience of the ordinary person, the author’s graphic works contain nothing that would not already exist in the cultural stratum of everyday life and in the everyday consciousness of an ordinary person, predominantly a man. Schizoid in their expression, the graphic works seem to assert an almost indisputable truth, according to which “in his own imagination and in the imagination of others, a man is nothing other than his genitals” (Walters).

And yet his project is more than the product of non-normative creativity and sexual fantasies. It is, above all, a social and topical project. Unafraid of accusations of marginality, the artist shows where and what “hurts” in contemporary man and, through graphic shock therapy, relieves what has become painful… Stas’s work is akin to visual art for which there are no marginal or unacceptable scenes.