«Stylus Drawings»
Salamatin’s work is connected to the space of inclusive practices, a community that is special to me and I understand reality. Some call it Art Brut (crude and uncut), Outsider Art (excluded, marginalized), Naïve Art, that is, Primitivism (intentionally simplifying forms), or even Minority Art (that is, minority art) in the old fashioned way. For me, it is an aesthetic and a kind of lifestyle, that is, a process in which the final image is not the final point, a self-valuable event or reference point in the world of the artist, it is like a note for a musician, a pass for a dancer or a frame for a film director.
The author works in the art studio “Perspectives”. When creating graphics and music, he uses a stylus that is attached to his face, as well as computer equipment and programs: Paint and FL Studio 8 XXL. In fact, this method of work gave the project a name – “Stylus Drawings”. The exhibition is based on the artist’s digital “graffiti” made over the past 5 years (2016-2021) and transferred from 2D to 3D format. The exhibition is accompanied by music by his own authorship and is a phantasmagorical walk through a series of portal scenes. An abstract and flattened vision of everyday life is juxtaposed here with a monumental and decorative sense of space. The viewer is actually in the artist’s head: pictures of domestic and everyday life (“Medical Practice”, “Dacha”), adjacent to generalized concepts (“Stairway to Another World”), impressions (“Sunburst”) and a view of his native city (“St. Petersburg”). The works touch with their irrationality and visionarity, altered proportions and seemingly twisted perspective, emphasis on loud colors and internal tightness of the depicted images. The author’s genuine sincerity and simplicity discourages and attracts at the same time, because when creating his works he was guided only by his own script, far from focusing on the classical canons of beauty and great styles of art.
Text: Katya Mikhatova
Music: Solomon Keys
