Continuing our look back at past exhibitions, this week we revisit Stas Volyazlovsky’s ‘Libertage-II’ exhibition, a joint project between the Kharkiv Municipal Gallery and Kyiv’s Karas Gallery in 2016.
Stas Volyazlovsky (1971-2018) was a Kherson-based artist, photographer, and Malevich Prize laureate. He founded the unique artistic style of “chanson-art,” a visual language through which he tackled taboo subjects with unwavering black humor, presenting them without filters or disgust.
Kharkiv audiences had previously seen Volyazlovsky’s work in exhibition performances by the SOSka group and in the TOTEM group exhibition at the MG in 2007, but ‘Libertage-II’ was the artist’s first LIFETIME solo project in Kharkiv.
The MG presented the artist’s graphic works, created with a ballpoint pen. Executed in a spontaneous drawing technique, these works depicted the cultural clichés of everyday life, revealing the habitual consciousness of the individual, primarily male. The graphic works’ schizoid expressions almost unequivocally asserted a truth: in one’s own imagination and in the imagination of others, a man is nothing more than his sexual organs.
However, the ‘Libertage-II’ project was more than just the result of non-normative creativity and sexual fantasies. It was, above all, a social and relevant project. Without fear of accusations of marginality, the artist showed where and what “hurts” in contemporary people, and through graphic shock therapy, he alleviated the most painful.
