Stanislav Volyazlovsky is a Ukrainian artist, a member of the Kherson association TOTEM, the hop-glem band RAPANI, laureate of the Kazimir Malevich Art Prize in 2010, and a prominent representative of the Kherson cultural scene and the artistic phenomenon HerArt. Known among the Kherson community as Stasevich, Stasik, Volyazlo.
Stas Volyazlovsky was born in 1971 in Kherson, where he worked throughout his life, consciously not changing his place of residence. The artist’s family consisted of representatives of different social strata, and therefore, according to the author, “there were both janitors and nobles in the family”. This was noticeably reflected in Volyazlovsky’s character and manners and manifested in his artistic practice. On his mother’s side, Volyazlovsky had Russian and Ossetian roots, and on his father’s side — Polish and Ukrainian. Volyazlovsky was raised by his mother, Alla Borisovna. The artist had a close family, everyday, and psychological connection with her, which influenced the themes of many of the author’s works, particularly most vividly expressed in his video works.
Volyazlovsky’s artistic practice and style can be described as the aesthetics of poor and amateur art, that is, a mixture of art povera and art brut. He did not have higher professional art education but studied at the Kherson Art School and completed courses for decorative artists. Volyazlovsky himself defined his practice as Chanson-art and treated it as a kind of art therapy that allows one to free oneself from the dominance of problems, crime, religions, television, the internet, pornography, series, politics, all that he “in a cheap-concentrated form pours out onto a sheet or old used sheets, which he decorates with ballpoint pens”.
Volyazlovsky worked in graphics, painting, video art, installation, performance, photography, and poetry. His art is characterized by a laconic combination of visuality and textuality, forming a recognizable authorial style built on images and aesthetics of the South Ukrainian social margin, that is, the contingent of colonies and prison aesthetics. This is explained by several colonies located in the Kherson region and a certain social environment of the city where the artist grew up and lived.
Thematically, Volyazlovsky’s practice is a sarcasm on provincial homophobia and everyday kitsch, tends towards pornographic images, and is saturated with obscene vocabulary. His art highlights phenomena of philistine thinking, which, according to the artist, contradict common sense. The artist verbally and visually constructed the grotesqueness of provincial everyday life into coherent and expressive artworks — short films, drawings, installations, textile works, poems, and musical compositions.
In the 1990s, for 10 years, Volyazlovsky taught ceramics to teenagers at a local vocational school and the Center for Children and Youth. Volyazlovsky was also interested in easel graphics and, together with artist Felix Kider, practiced creating ex-libris. Incidentally, he studied primitive ceramic ornaments, from which he adopted sexualized stylizations of sexual acts and genital symbols into his practice. Alongside teaching teenagers, Volyazlovsky drew illustrations for adult fairy tales and decorated albums of Kherson underground and alternative bands such as “Vitya Maleev at School and at Home” and “Piĉismo.” Despite belonging to the Kherson informal scene, it was the aesthetics of provincial “gopniks” that influenced Volyazlovsky’s work, to the personalities and worldview features of which he was neither indifferent nor condescending.
Volyazlovsky participated in exhibitions of decorative and applied arts of the Kherson Artists’ Union, but by the late 1990s, he lost interest in ceramics and joined the activities of the Kherson Center for Youth Initiatives TOTEM. Together with the founders and leaders of the center, Maksym and Olena Afanasiev, Volyazlovsky created his first experimental videos, clips, analogs of “liquid television.” This experience, cooperation, and friendship with the Afanasievs over the following years influenced Volyazlovsky’s creativity — thus appeared original, sharply sarcastic, and cheeky video works, whose heroes often became the artist’s close circle and himself.
Meeting Vyacheslav Mashnitsky, who returned to Kherson in 2002, became one of the defining moments in Volyazlovsky’s practice. In Mashnitsky’s newly created apartment-gallery, which soon turned into the Kherson Museum of Contemporary Art, Volyazlovsky’s first solo exhibition — “Waiting for the Snowman” — took place in 2003. Later, acquaintance with the art of artists from the Kyiv squat Paris Commune and personally with Yuriy Solomko changed Volyazlovsky’s artistic interests and influenced his authorial style. He became interested in art brut, works of schizophrenics, and reassembled his own practice into a new artistic form. This contributed to the emergence of his recognizable “rags” — ballpoint pen drawings on used textiles (sheets, tablecloths, pillowcases, aprons). He borrowed the idea of drawing with a ballpoint pen on fabric from the tradition of creating prison “marks” — poetic messages from behind bars that prisoners sent to relatives as a symbol of repentance. Volyazlovsky’s “rags” became the dominant direction in the artist’s practice for a long time, embodying Kherson’s poor art and the subject of his career rise. Some works in the “rags” technique and a number of video works were created in collaboration with Yulia Volyazlovska, the artist’s third wife and associate.
Meeting Kyiv curator Oleksandr Solovyov at the Kherson Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005 and participating in the group international exhibition “GENERATIONS. UA/USA” at PinchukArtCentre in 2007 facilitated further communication between Volyazlovsky and Moscow gallerist Vladimir Ovcharenko and the “RIDZHINA” gallery. This marked the beginning of a successful and intense period of commercial success, active exhibition activity, participation in auctions, and international art fairs. Ovcharenko created demand for Volyazlovsky’s “rags” and turned the artist into a rising star of the post-Soviet art scene. Volyazlovsky simultaneously worked with video art, which he created together with Kharkiv artist and friend Serhiy Bratkov. He also collaborated with the Dnipro alternative magazine NASH, where he contributed poetry, published his easel works, and photo series for many years.
In 2010, nominated by the TOTEM Center, Stas Volyazlovsky became a laureate of the Kazimir Malevich Prize from the Polish Institute, and the work “Cats Against Chinese Pederasty” was selected by curator Monika Shevchik for the collection of the Polish Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok. For many years, Volyazlovsky participated in the contemporary art symposium Biryuchiy and the Terra Futura festival. The artist’s exhibitions took place at the Kyiv gallery “Karas.” Together with the group R.E.P. and the Art Council, Volyazlovsky participated in the exhibition project “Communities,” where he presented Kherson art as the phenomenon HerArt.
The political situation of 2013–2014, the revolution in Ukraine, and the war with Russia negatively affected Stas Volyazlovsky’s financial situation and artistic practice. Commercial interest in his art remained in the past, and with it ceased active exhibition activity in Russia and abroad. In Ukraine, amid revolutionary moods and public demand for heroic art on the theme of national identity, Volyazlovsky’s sarcastic and grotesque works did not enjoy previous success. This coincided with personal troubles, a creative crisis, and doubts about his own practice, which consequently led to a prolonged depression.
During this period, Volyazlovsky collaborated with artists from the DE-NE-DE initiative and Alina Yakubenko, creating a joint project in residence with Alevtyna Kahidze — the art book “How an Artist to an Artist / How an Artistess — to an Artist.”
Stas actively worked with the local context and the exhibition formation of exhibitions and projects at the Kherson Museum of Contemporary Art. In particular, the exhibition “Bitter!”, the solo exhibition of Zhanna Vzbranna, and many other museum exhibitions were created with Volyazlovsky’s curatorial cooperation. For a long time, Volyazlovsky was an unnamed curator of the museum in collaboration with Semen Khramtsov and under the management of Vyacheslav Mashnitsky.
However, the most famous collaboration of the 2010s in Stas Volyazlovsky’s practice was the musical hop-glem band “RAPANI,” which he created in 2011 together with Kherson designer and artist Semen Khramtsov. “RAPANI” emerged as an ironic artistic form mocking provincial tastes in music and the aesthetics of local show business. The outrageous stage images of the participants imitate the provincial stereotype of homosexuality, exaggerating it to mock everyday homophobia existing in post-Soviet Ukrainian society. The band’s first and most famous clip was the single “Мы не петухи!” (We Are Not Roosters!), and in 2016 the band released a namesake album. The presentation of the new project and the clip “Zvezdochet” took place at the Lviv gallery Detenpyla in 2017.
On January 11, 2018, Stas Volyazlovsky died under tragic uncertain circumstances and in a state of depression. He is buried in Kherson.
In 2018, the Moscow gallery “RIDZHINA,” curated by Serhiy Bratkov, held the first posthumous exhibition of Stas Volyazlovsky, where his iconic “rags” and videos created with Bratkov were presented. Later that year, the first Ukrainian posthumous retrospective of the artist took place at the Odessa Museum of Contemporary Art, organized jointly with Vyacheslav Mashnitsky and Semen Khramtsov, curated by Oleksandra Tryanova, where the focus of the author’s artistic practice was shifted to video works and Volyazlovsky’s poetic legacy. In 2019, his mother Alla Borisovna Volyazlovska transferred the artist’s archive and collection of works, including ceramics, children’s drawings, and artworks from the Hryn family collection for further preservation.
The author’s practice can be divided into an early ceramic period when Volyazlovsky was searching for his own style, using primitive ornaments and the aesthetics of linear graphic-font images to decorate ceramics, as well as albums and concerts of musician friends.
The second, most fruitful and recognizable period was the author’s “rags,” which revealed Volyazlovsky’s unique style and embodied Kherson’s poor art. Alongside the “rags,” which Volyazlovsky created as pompous panels and homages to celebrities — politicians, writers, artists — the artist worked with paper. In cycles of “wall newspapers,” modeled after late Soviet homemade public bulletins, the author raised themes of social prejudices, depicted curious scenes from life and public moods. “Reports” became dedications to comrades and quick sketches of everyday troubles and the artist’s provincial life. Overall, on paper, the artist felt freer than in the “high and pompous style” he independently constructed in textile works. In easel works, on textiles and paper, Volyazlovsky combined poetic text, authorial grammar, and font solutions with visual images that sometimes illustrated the texts or, conversely, visually defined the idea of the work.
Video works are the least studied and described artistic output of the author, which not only depicts but literally documents social sores and the absurdity of provincial everyday life. In his video works, Volyazlovsky not only ironizes about his surroundings but also harshly mocks his own everyday life and circumstances of existence. It is important to consider the direction and creation of clips for the band Rapani in collaboration with Semen Khramtsov in Volyazlovsky’s video output. Also, video works created together with Serhiy Bratkov, where Volyazlovsky is not only a co-author but often the main character of the staged video story.
His media experiments are not limited to video works. For example, Volyazlovsky engaged in photography as a photo correspondent for Kherson publications and also prepared grant photo reports for project work of local cultural initiatives. Such practice was a way for Volyazlovsky to earn a living in the absence of stable income from art. However, Volyazlovsky himself rarely considered his shots as authorial artworks. Exceptions are series that the author positioned during his lifetime as part of his artistic practice. Among these is the series “Le Broche de famille” published in the edition “Ukrainian Erotica,” as well as works from Volyazlovsky’s last lifetime exhibition at the Kherson Museum of Contemporary Art “#Crash_Matrix,” which took place on the artist’s birthday. After Volyazlovsky’s death, holding exhibitions of the artist on his birthday became an annual memorial tradition of the museum — in 2018 it was the project “Poems,” where Volyazlovsky’s poetry was read for the first time. In 2019, the exhibition “Originals” — an exposition built on preparatory materials for Volyazlovsky’s “rags,” which the author created on large sheets of transparent paper.
A separate milestone in Volyazlovsky’s creativity should be outlined as his poetic and literary output, which was independently presented in an exhibition publication for the retrospective memorial exhibition of Volyazlovsky in Odessa in 2018. And already in 2019, the artist’s poetry was published in two poetry collections: one published by the Hryn family foundation, the other released on the initiative of Hennadiy Kozub and the Kherson Museum of Contemporary Art. The refined textuality to which Volyazlovsky tended in his artistic works was rather verbal images with embedded metaphors and allusions to a high epistolary style, combined with obscene vocabulary and sharp social and provocative themes.
Overall, Stas Volyazlovsky’s artistic activity is distinctly autobiographical. However, it is also important to note his pedagogical practice as one that influenced the formation of a new generation of Kherson artists. Also, to emphasize his curatorial experience, which, although not articulated as a type of artist’s practice, nevertheless influenced the formation of the Kherson art scene and its promotion beyond Kherson. The artist dreamed and longed for recognition and fame throughout his life, although during his lifetime he was already one of the most famous Ukrainian artists of his generation and contemporary Ukrainian art. Comment type: Summary
Author: Halyna Hleba
