More words ↓

1. Introduction
1.1 Nick Tarasov is an anti-disciplinary artist (see 5), whose practice encompasses photography, painting, graphic design, and textual research.
1.2 Nick lives, works, thinks, writes, draws, doubts, tries, and finds — mostly in St. Petersburg (RU), and often somewhere else.
1.3 Some links:

(CV)
(work)

2. Vision
2.1 For Nick, art is a way of engaging with the world, a means of reflecting on time, culture, and identity.
2.2 His practice brings together creation, theory, teaching, and research, forming a way of thinking in which visual language and textual reflection remain in constant dialogue.
2.3 His focus is directed toward processes of perception, memory, time, and identity — toward how artistic images can become containers of experience, holding both the personal and the collective.
2.4 Nick graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, which provided a technical foundation, yet his independent practice moved beyond academic frameworks toward experimental engagement with material and process.
2.5 Nick's artistic perspective has been shaped by academic training, independent practice, teaching, and ongoing engagement with international art and visual culture (see 8).
2.6 Painting, photography, graphics, and design are the media through which Nick tries to translate his vision into practice.

3. Practice
3.1 Photography
3.1.1 For Nick, photography is a field of engagement. He proceeds from the idea that meaning arises not at the moment of pressing the shutter, but within a prolonged and unpredictable material cycle.
3.1.2 He strives to bring a sense of multilayeredness, processuality, and tactility into his photographs.
3.1.3 His photographic projects articulate a dialogue with photography as a practice more connected to personal memory and emotional subjectivity than to the fixation of objective reality.
3.1.4 The figures in Nick's photographs are not models but rather co-participants, whose lives intersect with his own. His portrait series are filled with a sense of shared vulnerability, which he as author inhabits alongside them.
3.1.5 Nick thinks in terms of series, not single images. Photographs acquire meaning not individually but through their confrontation, through the tension that emerges between them.
3.1.6 He works with the book as an artistic object, where rhythm, combinations, sequence, pauses, design solutions, and tactile perception all matter.
3.1.6.1 For him, the book is a way of creating an intimate one-to-one space of dialogue between artist and viewer.
3.1.6.2 Book design is not mere packaging — it is part of its content.
3.1.7 Through his photographic practice, Nick seeks to explore the experience of duration. He approaches photographs as containers for storing time.
3.1.8 His photographs endure a "duration." Temporality is inscribed in the very fabric of the image: grain and artifacts establish a stretch of contemplation.
3.1.9 He regards print as a form of authorial voice: each mode of producing the image — from photographic paper to inkjet printing — sounds differently.

3.2 Painting
3.2.1 For Nick, painting is a process, a practice, and a form of thought. The canvas becomes a space where consciousness and gesture merge, where thought does not precede the image but emerges with it, generating new non-discursive meanings.
3.2.2 His paintings record processes of searching, hesitation, and change rather than aiming for fixed or finished forms.
3.2.3 Nick considers painting as a conversation not only with himself but with the history of art, with past and present alike.
3.2.4 His freedom lies in allowing the painting to remain fragile, imperfect, and open.
3.2.5 For him, what matters is not only the traces of the hand's movement, but also emptiness — the spaces between gestures and brushstrokes.
3.2.5.1 For Nick, this emptiness has an almost spiritual significance: within it the artist is most fully present. It becomes a site of encounter between viewer and artist, a place where personal experience acquires universal resonance.
3.2.6 For Nick, painting is not a means of arriving at answers, but a way of tracing the movement toward questions themselves — a process that remains deeply personal and marked by inner struggle.
3.2.7 Nick sees painting as a response to historical and human reality. Each work becomes a kind of reaction to time, an articulation of position, even if expressed through abstract means.

3.3 Design
3.3.1 For Nick, design is a way of speaking to the world, creating new visual metaphors and cultural codes. It is one of the languages of culture. He sees every decision as an opportunity to build a dialogue that exceeds function.
3.3.2 In each project, Nick seeks to express ideas through composition, typography, and graphic form.
3.3.2.1 Within this logic, the designer becomes a researcher, discovering new ways of looking at the familiar.
3.3.3 Nick is interested in the point of intersection between content and visual form: how the word ceases to be a transparent vehicle of meaning and begins to act on its own, as an object.
3.3.3.1 Letters and signs are not only read, but also generate atmosphere, evoke emotion, and construct a new experience of language.
3.3.3.2 Design is a way to refine the perception of the world — to make it slightly clearer, more joyful, or more profound.
3.3.4 The viewer, encountering his work, is compelled to reconstruct meanings, to find their own rhythm of reading, to interact with form as with a riddle. This is where the idea of co-authorship emerges: design ceases to be a monologue and turns into a space for the collective creation of experience.
3.3.5 Nick is convinced that design is not only a tool of communication, but also a form of cultural inquiry.
3.3.5.1 Design can serve as should be a mediator between art, media, and audience, shaping new cultural meanings.
3.3.5.2 He regards design as an instrument capable of shaping public consciousness and influencing the perception of cultural phenomena.
3.3.5.3 In this regard, every visual detail carries weight and demands careful attention.
3.3.6 Nick sees visual solutions in design as an extension of concepts, cultural contexts, and the author’s personal position.
3.3.7 Design is the ability to understand culture, society, and the psychology of perception, and to work with them through visual solutions.
3.3.8 In his view, the freedom of the designer lies not only in choosing form or color, but also in establishing new contexts, questioning dominant values, and demonstrating that communication can be unexpected, fragile, and honest.

3.4 Theory
3.4.1 Nick writes essays and texts for media on contemporary art, merging research-based and artistic perspectives.
3.4.2 His main directions include the analysis of visual practices in the post-industrial era, questions of documentary and its subversion, research on visual identity, and the ethics and philosophy of art.

3.5 Teaching
3.5.1 For Nick, teaching is inseparably linked to his practice. By sharing his experience, he reformulates his own tasks and rethinks what he himself has accomplished.
3.5.2 In his courses, he brings together artistic practice, theoretical foundations, and an attentiveness to the student’s individuality.
3.5.3 Nick believes that art education should go beyond technical skills.
3.5.3.1 Its main goals are to cultivate critical thinking, the ability to formulate questions, to build dialogue, and to find one’s own visual language.
3.5.4 He is convinced that to teach means not to transmit a ready-made system of values, but to create conditions for searching: collective, vulnerable, and risky.
3.5.5 Nick encourages interdisciplinary approaches, merging painting, graphics, design, and theoretical inquiry within a single educational process.

3.6 Music
3.6.1 Nick explores the emotional and conceptual structure of music, seeking to translate its language into graphic form.
3.6.2 Music, like the visual arts, generates rhythms and tensions.
3.6.3 He believes that music and visuality exist in dialogue: each expands the perception of the other.
3.6.3.1 Nick finds in music principles for the formal organization of his visual compositions.
3.6.4 Music teaches him to perceive painting not as a static object but as a temporal process in which the viewer participates corporeally, almost physically.

4. Ethics
4.1 Nick believes that ethical questions must exist for the artist alongside aesthetic ones. Ethics imbue aesthetics with meaning.
4.1.1 He refers to Robert Motherwell, who once stated: "I believe that painter’s judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context."
4.2 Ethical reflection underlies the choice of aesthetics, while visual form expresses an inner moral stance.
4.3 Nick is convinced that authorial freedom is possible only when the artist does not renounce responsibility for what is created.
4.4 Nick holds that any artistic action contains an ethical dimension: the choice of line, color, or form is not only a matter of taste but a position toward the world.
4.4.1 This honesty of gesture transforms each of his works into an act of trust toward the viewer: the artist reveals the inner in order to awaken in the other the capacity for empathy and reflection.
4.5 Nick does not believe in beauty for its own sake: for him, beauty should carry meaning beyond appearance.
4.6 Sometimes it is precisely a sharp or radical gesture that proves most ethical, because it unsettles the viewer, forcing them to reflect.

5. Antidisciplinarity
5.1 For Nick, artistic practice is not divided into genres or disciplines—there exist only different instruments with which one can think and create.
5.2 Each new work is an inquiry in which the artist has the opportunity to articulate their vision and choose the most fitting instrument for their artistic gesture.
5.3 Nick moves material between media as if moving between the rooms of a single house.
5.3.1 Boundaries exist only in order to be crossed.
5.4 Art, in his understanding, is a unified system of meanings that exceeds the everyday, the economic, the political, and the social.
5.4.1 Works of art outlive human lives and shape long-term cultural codes.

6. Integratedness
6.1 Nick believes in the concept of integrated art, where form, color, and space interact with cultural and social contexts.
6.1.1 Art not only permeates different spheres of life but also reflects the specific states of society.
6.2 Nick is convinced that the artist can shape the reality around them, setting new rules and values.
6.2.1 He hopes that art can influence the way people think, perceive the world, and relate to culture and one another.
6.3 For this reason, he believes that artistic practice should extend beyond galleries and museums and engage with broader social and cultural spaces.
6.4 If one considers nature as a system of self-regulation, one may also assume that art can become a model of these processes, their visible projection.

7. Influence
7.1 Nick’s vision and practice would not be what they are without the influence of people—their experience and worldview—whose names are listed below (in random order).
7.1.1 Filmmakers: Ingmar Bergman, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Eugène Green, Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke, Giuseppe Tornatore, Lars von Trier, Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Wim Wenders, Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Akira Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Kim Ki-duk, Stanley Kubrick, Xavier Dolan, Paolo Sorrentino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, Albert Serra, Werner Herzog, Aleksandr Sokurov, Emir Kusturica, Sergei Parajanov.
7.1.2 Photographers: JH Engström, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anders Petersen, Daido Moriyama, Daisuke Yokota, Jacob Aue Sobol, Michael Ackerman, Jem Southam, Rinko Kawauchi, Paul Graham, Daniel Shea, Paolo Roversi, Alexander Gronsky, Andrey Bogush.
7.1.3 Artists: Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, Pablo Picasso, Walid Raad, David Ostrowski, On Kawara, Takesada Matsutani, Nam June Paik, Jiro Yoshihara, Robert Motherwell, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Alÿs, Giuseppe Penone, Paul Winstanley, Timur Novikov, Anatoly Osmolovsky, the Mono-ha movement.
7.1.3.1 And more traditional authors: Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev, Fra Angelico, Cima da Conegliano, Rogier van der Weyden, Sandro Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, El Greco, Rembrandt, Francisco de Zurbarán, Georges de La Tour, Andrew Wyeth, Aleksandr Shevchenko, Ivan Uralov.
7.1.3.2 Japanese painting: Hakuin Ekaku, Miyamoto Musashi, Kano Naonobu, Soga Shohaku.
7.1.4 Designers and studios: Stefan Sagmeister, Peter Saville, Mirko Borsche, Kasper-Florio, Actual Source, M/M (Paris), Walter Nikkels, Irma Boom, Cyan, OK-RM, Spassky Fischer, Ines Cox.
7.1.4.1 Fashion designers: Ann Demeulemeester, Ria Dunn (Lost&Found), Damir Doma, Hedi Slimane, Dries van Noten, Yohji Yamamoto, Maurizio Altieri (Carpe Diem), Nutsa Modebadze, Kazuyuki Kumagai (Attachment), Takahiro Miyashita (The Soloist, Number (N)ine), Nobuhiko Satoh (If Six Was Nine, Le Grande Bleu), Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons), Tomoaki Okaniwa (The Viridi-anne), Jun Takahashi (Undercover), Mihara Yasuhiro, Mikhail Panteleev (Volga Volga), Maison Martin Margiela, Carol Christian Poell, Raf Simons, Individual Sentiments, Syngman Cucala, Demna Gvasalia, Nicolo Ceski Bellini (Poeme Bohemien), Daisuke Nishida (Devoa), Angelo Iannello (Masnada).
7.1.5 Electronic music: Mike Paradinas, Daisuke Tanabe, Chris Clark, Andrew Turner and Ed Handley (Plaid), Ametsub, Bad Sector.
7.1.5.1 John Cage.
7.1.5.2 Songs by Nautilus Pompilius, Boris Grebenshchikov, Zemfira, Yegor Letov, Alexander Gorodnitsky, Alexander Galich, Evgeny Klyachkin, Vladimir Vysotsky, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Shocking Blue, Jozef van Wissem.
7.1.6 Writers and poets: Joseph Brodsky, Ilya Kormiltsev, Franz Kafka, Victor Pelevin.
7.1.6.1 Sacred texts: Heart Sutra, The Diamond Sutra.
7.1.7 Articles and lectures: Boris Groys, Victor Miziano, Ekaterina Degot, Alexander Pyatigorsky.
7.1.8 Philosophical ideas: Friedrich Nietzsche, Takuan Soho, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben.
7.2 Nick would be glad if his works looked the way "All Is Silence" by Ametsub sounds.

8. Important
8.1 --------------------------------------------- trials------------------------------------------------------------------------- experimentation
8.2 --------------------------------------- time and doubts --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------.
8.3 The ---------------------------------------------------------------- failures----------------------------------------------------------------------------.
8.4 The process ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- non-linear ---------------------.
8.5 This text was written by ChatGPT after a long conversation with Nick. But it’s a secret. design of meanings
8.6 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- solutions.

9. Words
9.1 Nick perceives the word as an expressive medium equal to the image.
9.1.1 Through this, his theory and practice always exist in dialogue.
9.2 The words written here articulate Nick’s vision, his principles, convictions, and interests. They speak of him as an artist no less than images would.
9.3 Nick is also deeply grateful to all his teachers, his parents, his grandmother, V.M., friends, and colleagues.

2. Vision
2.1 For Nick, art is a way of engaging with the world, a means of reflecting on time, culture, and identity.
2.2 His practice brings together creation, theory, teaching, and research, forming a way of thinking in which visual language and textual reflection remain in constant dialogue.
2.3 His focus is directed toward processes of perception, memory, time, and identity — toward how artistic images can become containers of experience, holding both the personal and the collective.
2.4 Nick graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, which provided a technical foundation, yet his independent practice moved beyond academic frameworks toward experimental engagement with material and process.
2.5 Nick's artistic perspective has been shaped by academic training, independent practice, teaching, and ongoing engagement with international art and visual culture (see 8).
2.6 Painting, photography, graphics, and design are the media through which Nick tries to translate his vision into practice.

3. Practice
3.1 Photography
3.1.1 For Nick, photography is field of engagement. He proceeds from the idea that meaning arises not at the moment of pressing the shutter, but within a prolonged and unpredictable material cycle.
3.1.2 He strives to bring a sense of multilayeredness, processuality, and tactility into his photographs.
3.1.3 His photographic projects articulate a dialogue with photography as a practice more connected to personal memory and emotional subjectivity than to the fixation of objective reality.
3.1.4 The figures in Nick's photographs are not models but rather co-participants, whose lives intersect with his own. His portrait series are filled with a sense of shared vulnerability, which he as author inhabits alongside them.
3.1.5 Nick thinks in terms of series, not single images. Photographs acquire meaning not individually but through their confrontation, through the tension that emerges between them.
3.1.6 He works with the book as an artistic object, where rhythm, combinations, sequence, pauses, design solutions, and tactile perception all matter.
3.1.6.1 For him, the book is a way of creating an intimate one-to-one space of dialogue between artist and viewer.
3.1.6.2 Book design is not mere packaging — it is part of its content.
3.1.7 Through his photographic practice, Nick seeks to explore the experience of duration. He approaches photographs as containers for storing time.
3.1.8 His photographs endure a "duration." Temporality is inscribed in the very fabric of the image: grain and artifacts establish a stretch of contemplation.
3.1.9 He regards print as a form of authorial voice: each mode of producing the image — from photographic paper to inkjet printing — sounds differently.

3.2 Painting
3.2.1 For Nick, painting is a process, a practice, and a form of thought. The canvas becomes a space where consciousness and gesture merge, where thought does not precede the image but emerges with it, generating new non-discursive meanings.
3.2.2 His paintings record processes of searching, hesitation, and change rather than aiming for fixed or finished forms.
3.2.3 Nick considers painting as a conversation not only with himself but with the history of art, with past and present alike.
3.2.4 His freedom lies in allowing the painting to remain fragile, imperfect, and open.
3.2.5 For him, what matters is not only the traces of the hand's movement, but also emptiness — the spaces between gestures and brushstrokes.
3.2.5.1 For Nick, this emptiness has an almost spiritual significance: within it the artist is most fully present. It becomes a site of encounter between viewer and artist, a place where personal experience acquires universal resonance.
3.2.6 For Nick, painting is not a means of arriving at answers, but a way of tracing the movement toward questions themselves — a process that remains deeply personal and marked by inner struggle.
3.2.7 Nick sees painting as a response to historical and human reality. Each work becomes a kind of reaction to time, an articulation of position, even if expressed through abstract means.

3.3 Design
3.3.1 For Nick, design is a way of speaking to the world, creating new visual metaphors and cultural codes. It is one of the languages of culture. He sees every decision as an opportunity to build a dialogue that exceeds function.
3.3.2 In each project, Nick seeks to express ideas through composition, typography, and graphic form.
3.3.2.1 Within this logic, the designer becomes a researcher, discovering new ways of looking at the familiar.
3.3.3 Nick is interested in the point of intersection between content and visual form: how the word ceases to be a transparent vehicle of meaning and begins to act on its own, as an object.
3.3.3.1 Letters and signs are not only read, but also generate atmosphere, evoke emotion, and construct a new experience of language.
3.3.3.2 Design is a way to refine the perception of the world — to make it slightly clearer, more joyful, or more profound.
3.3.4 The viewer, encountering his work, is compelled to reconstruct meanings, to find their own rhythm of reading, to interact with form as with a riddle. This is where the idea of co-authorship emerges: design ceases to be a monologue and turns into a space for the collective creation of experience.
3.3.5 Nick is convinced that design is not only a tool of communication, but also a form of cultural inquiry.
3.3.5.1 Design can serve as should be a mediator between art, media, and audience, shaping new cultural meanings.
3.3.5.2 He regards design as an instrument capable of shaping public consciousness and influencing the perception of cultural phenomena.
3.3.5.3 In this regard, every visual detail carries weight and demands careful attention.
3.3.6 Nick sees visual solutions in design as an extension of concepts, cultural contexts, and the author’s personal position.
3.3.7 Design is the ability to understand culture, society, and the psychology of perception, and to work with them through visual solutions.
3.3.8 In his view, the freedom of the designer lies not only in choosing form or color, but also in establishing new contexts, questioning dominant values, and demonstrating that communication can be unexpected, fragile, and honest.

3.4 Theory
3.4.1 Nick writes essays and texts for media on contemporary art, merging research-based and artistic perspectives.
3.4.2 His main directions include the analysis of visual practices in the post-industrial era, questions of documentary and its subversion, research on visual identity, and the ethics and philosophy of art.

3.5 Teaching
3.5.1 For Nick, teaching is inseparably linked to his practice. By sharing his experience, he reformulates his own tasks and rethinks what he himself has accomplished.
3.5.2 In his courses, he brings together artistic practice, theoretical foundations, and an attentiveness to the student’s individuality.
3.5.3 Nick believes that art education should go beyond technical skills.
3.5.3.1 Its main goals are to cultivate critical thinking, the ability to formulate questions, to build dialogue, and to find one’s own visual language.
3.5.4 He is convinced that to teach means not to transmit a ready-made system of values, but to create conditions for searching: collective, vulnerable, and risky.
3.5.5 Nick encourages interdisciplinary approaches, merging painting, graphics, design, and theoretical inquiry within a single educational process.

3.6 Music
3.6.1 Nick explores the emotional and conceptual structure of music, seeking to translate its language into graphic form.
3.6.2 Music, like the visual arts, generates rhythms and tensions.
3.6.3 He believes that music and visuality exist in dialogue: each expands the perception of the other.
3.6.3.1 Nick finds in music principles for the formal organization of his visual compositions.
3.6.4 Music teaches him to perceive painting not as a static object but as a temporal process in which the viewer participates corporeally, almost physically.

4. Ethics
4.1 Nick believes that ethical questions must exist for the artist alongside aesthetic ones. Ethics imbue aesthetics with meaning.
4.1.1 He refers to Robert Motherwell, who once stated: "I believe that painter’s judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context."
4.2 Ethical reflection underlies the choice of aesthetics, while visual form expresses an inner moral stance.
4.3 Nick is convinced that authorial freedom is possible only when the artist does not renounce responsibility for what is created.
4.4 Nick holds that any artistic action contains an ethical dimension: the choice of line, color, or form is not only a matter of taste but a position toward the world.
4.4.1 This honesty of gesture transforms each of his works into an act of trust toward the viewer: the artist reveals the inner in order to awaken in the other the capacity for empathy and reflection.
4.5 Nick does not believe in beauty for its own sake: for him, beauty should carry meaning beyond appearance.
4.6 Sometimes it is precisely a sharp or radical gesture that proves most ethical, because it unsettles the viewer, forcing them to reflect.

5. Antidisciplinarity
5.1 For Nick, artistic practice is not divided into genres or disciplines—there exist only different instruments with which one can think and create.
5.2 Each new work is an inquiry in which the artist has the opportunity to articulate their vision and choose the most fitting instrument for their artistic gesture.
5.3 Nick moves material between media as if moving between the rooms of a single house.
5.3.1 Boundaries exist only in order to be crossed.
5.4 Art, in his understanding, is a unified system of meanings that exceeds the everyday, the economic, the political, and the social.
5.4.1 Works of art outlive human lives and shape long-term cultural codes.

6. Integratedness
6.1 Nick believes in the concept of integrated art, where form, color, and space interact with cultural and social contexts.
6.1.1 Art not only permeates different spheres of life but also reflects the specific states of society.
6.2 Nick is convinced that the artist can shape the reality around them, setting new rules and values.
6.2.1 He hopes that art can influence the way people think, perceive the world, and relate to culture and one another.
6.3 For this reason, he believes that artistic practice should extend beyond galleries and museums and engage with broader social and cultural spaces.
6.4 If one considers nature as a system of self-regulation, one may also assume that art can become a model of these processes, their visible projection.

7. Influence
7.1 Nick’s vision and practice would not be what they are without the influence of people—their experience and worldview—whose names are listed below (in random order).
7.1.1 Filmmakers: Ingmar Bergman, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Eugène Green, Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke, Giuseppe Tornatore, Lars von Trier, Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Wim Wenders, Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Akira Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Kim Ki-duk, Stanley Kubrick, Xavier Dolan, Paolo Sorrentino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, Albert Serra, Werner Herzog, Aleksandr Sokurov, Emir Kusturica, Sergei Parajanov.
7.1.2 Photographers: JH Engström, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anders Petersen, Daido Moriyama, Daisuke Yokota, Jacob Aue Sobol, Michael Ackerman, Jem Southam, Rinko Kawauchi, Paul Graham, Daniel Shea, Paolo Roversi, Alexander Gronsky, Andrey Bogush.
7.1.3 Artists: Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, Pablo Picasso, Walid Raad, David Ostrowski, On Kawara, Takesada Matsutani, Nam June Paik, Jiro Yoshihara, Robert Motherwell, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Alÿs, Giuseppe Penone, Paul Winstanley, Timur Novikov, Anatoly Osmolovsky, the Mono-ha movement.
7.1.3.1 And more traditional authors: Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev, Fra Angelico, Cima da Conegliano, Rogier van der Weyden, Sandro Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, El Greco, Rembrandt, Francisco de Zurbarán, Georges de La Tour, Andrew Wyeth, Aleksandr Shevchenko, Ivan Uralov.
7.1.3.2 Japanese painting: Hakuin Ekaku, Miyamoto Musashi, Kano Naonobu, Soga Shohaku.
7.1.4 Designers and studios: Stefan Sagmeister, Peter Saville, Mirko Borsche, Kasper-Florio, Actual Source, M/M (Paris), Irma Boom, Walter Nikkels, Cyan, OK-RM, Spassky Fischer, Ines Cox.
7.1.4.1 Fashion designers: Ann Demeulemeester, Ria Dunn (Lost&Found), Damir Doma, Hedi Slimane, Dries van Noten, Yohji Yamamoto, Maurizio Altieri (Carpe Diem), Nutsa Modebadze, Kazuyuki Kumagai (Attachment), Takahiro Miyashita (The Soloist, Number (N)ine), Nobuhiko Satoh (If Six Was Nine, Le Grande Bleu), Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons), Tomoaki Okaniwa (The Viridi-anne), Jun Takahashi (Undercover), Mihara Yasuhiro, Mikhail Panteleev (Volga Volga), Maison Martin Margiela, Carol Christian Poell, Raf Simons, Syngman Cucala, Demna Gvasalia, Individual Sentiments, Nicolo Ceski Bellini (Poeme Bohemien), Daisuke Nishida (Devoa), Angelo Iannello (Masnada).
7.1.5 Electronic music: Mike Paradinas, Daisuke Tanabe, Chris Clark, Andrew Turner and Ed Handley (Plaid), Ametsub, Bad Sector.
7.1.5.1 John Cage.
7.1.5.2 Songs by Nautilus Pompilius, Boris Grebenshchikov, Zemfira, Yegor Letov, Alexander Gorodnitsky, Alexander Galich, Evgeny Klyachkin, Vladimir Vysotsky, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Shocking Blue, Jozef van Wissem.
7.1.6 Writers and poets: Joseph Brodsky, Ilya Kormiltsev, Franz Kafka, Victor Pelevin.
7.1.6.1 Sacred texts: Heart Sutra, The Diamond Sutra.
7.1.7 Articles and lectures: Boris Groys, Victor Miziano, Ekaterina Degot, Alexander Pyatigorsky.
7.1.8 Philosophical ideas: Friedrich Nietzsche, Takuan Soho, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben.
7.2 Nick would be glad if his works looked the way "All Is Silence" by Ametsub sounds.

8. Important
8.1 --------------------------------------------- trials------------------------------------------------------------------------- experimentation
8.2 --------------------------------------- time and doubts --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------.
8.3 The ---------------------------------------------------------------- failures----------------------------------------------------------------------------.
8.4 The process ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- non-linear ---------------------.
8.5 This text was written by ChatGPT after a long conversation with Nick. But it’s a secret. design ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------of meanings
8.6 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- solutions.

9. Words
9.1 Nick perceives the word as an expressive medium equal to the image.
9.1.1 Through this, his theory and practice always exist in dialogue.
9.2 The words written here articulate Nick’s vision, his principles, convictions, and interests. They speak of him as an artist no less than images would.
9.3 Nick is also deeply grateful to all his teachers, his parents, his grandmother, V.M., friends, and colleagues.
2. Vision
2.1 For Nick, art is a way of engaging with the world, a means of reflecting on time, culture, and identity.
2.2 His practice brings together creation, theory, teaching, and research, forming a way of thinking in which visual language and textual reflection remain in constant dialogue.
2.3 His focus is directed toward processes of perception, memory, time, and identity — toward how artistic images can become containers of experience, holding both the personal and the collective.
2.4 Nick graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, which provided a technical foundation, yet his independent practice moved beyond academic frameworks toward experimental engagement with material and process.
2.5 Nick's artistic perspective has been shaped by academic training, independent practice, teaching, and ongoing engagement with international art and visual culture (see 8).
2.6 Painting, photography, graphics, and design are the media through which Nick tries to translate his vision into practice.

3. Practice
3.1 Photography
3.1.1 For Nick, photography is a field of engagement. He proceeds from the idea that meaning arises not at the moment of pressing the shutter, but within a prolonged and unpredictable material cycle.
3.1.2 He strives to bring a sense of multilayeredness, processuality, and tactility into his photographs.
3.1.3 His photographic projects articulate a dialogue with photography as a practice more connected to personal memory and emotional subjectivity than to the fixation of objective reality.
3.1.4 The figures in Nick's photographs are not models but rather co-participants, whose lives intersect with his own. His portrait series are filled with a sense of shared vulnerability, which he as author inhabits alongside them.
3.1.5 Nick thinks in terms of series, not single images. Photographs acquire meaning not individually but through their confrontation, through the tension that emerges between them.
3.1.6 He works with the book as an artistic object, where rhythm, combinations, sequence, pauses, design solutions, and tactile perception all matter.
3.1.6.1 For him, the book is a way of creating an intimate one-to-one space of dialogue between artist and viewer.
3.1.6.2 Book design is not mere packaging — it is part of its content.
3.1.7 Through his photographic practice, Nick seeks to explore the experience of duration. He approaches photographs as containers for storing time.
3.1.8 His photographs endure a "duration." Temporality is inscribed in the very fabric of the image: grain and artifacts establish a stretch of contemplation.
3.1.9 He regards print as a form of authorial voice: each mode of producing the image — from photographic paper to inkjet printing — sounds differently.

3.2 Painting
3.2.1 For Nick, painting is a process, a practice, and a form of thought. The canvas becomes a space where consciousness and gesture merge, where thought does not precede the image but emerges with it, generating new non-discursive meanings.
3.2.2 His paintings record processes of searching, hesitation, and change rather than aiming for fixed or finished forms.
3.2.3 Nick considers painting as a conversation not only with himself but with the history of art, with past and present alike.
3.2.4 His freedom lies in allowing the painting to remain fragile, imperfect, and open.
3.2.5 For him, what matters is not only the traces of the hand's movement, but also emptiness — the spaces between gestures and brushstrokes.
3.2.5.1 For Nick, this emptiness has an almost spiritual significance: within it the artist is most fully present. It becomes a site of encounter between viewer and artist, a place where personal experience acquires universal resonance.
3.2.6 For Nick, painting is not a means of arriving at answers, but a way of tracing the movement toward questions themselves — a process that remains deeply personal and marked by inner struggle.
3.2.7 Nick sees painting as a response to historical and human reality. Each work becomes a kind of reaction to time, an articulation of position, even if expressed through abstract means.

3.3 Design
3.3.1 For Nick, design is a way of speaking to the world, creating new visual metaphors and cultural codes. It is one of the languages of culture. He sees every decision as an opportunity to build a dialogue that exceeds function.
3.3.2 In each project, Nick seeks to express ideas through composition, typography, and graphic form.
3.3.2.1 Within this logic, the designer becomes a researcher, discovering new ways of looking at the familiar.
3.3.3 Nick is interested in the point of intersection between content and visual form: how the word ceases to be a transparent vehicle of meaning and begins to act on its own, as an object.
3.3.3.1 Letters and signs are not only read, but also generate atmosphere, evoke emotion, and construct a new experience of language.
3.3.3.2 Design is a way to refine the perception of the world — to make it slightly clearer, more joyful, or more profound.
3.3.4 The viewer, encountering his work, is compelled to reconstruct meanings, to find their own rhythm of reading, to interact with form as with a riddle. This is where the idea of co-authorship emerges: design ceases to be a monologue and turns into a space for the collective creation of experience.
3.3.5 Nick is convinced that design is not only a tool of communication, but also a form of cultural inquiry.
3.3.5.1 Design can serve as should be a mediator between art, media, and audience, shaping new cultural meanings.
3.3.5.2 He regards design as an instrument capable of shaping public consciousness and influencing the perception of cultural phenomena.
3.3.5.3 In this regard, every visual detail carries weight and demands careful attention.
3.3.6 Nick sees visual solutions in design as an extension of concepts, cultural contexts, and the author’s personal position.
3.3.7 Design is the ability to understand culture, society, and the psychology of perception, and to work with them through visual solutions.
3.3.8 In his view, the freedom of the designer lies not only in choosing form or color, but also in establishing new contexts, questioning dominant values, and demonstrating that communication can be unexpected, fragile, and honest.

3.4 Theory
3.4.1 Nick writes essays and texts for media on contemporary art, merging research-based and artistic perspectives.
3.4.2 His main directions include the analysis of visual practices in the post-industrial era, questions of documentary and its subversion, research on visual identity, and the ethics and philosophy of art.

3.5 Teaching
3.5.1 For Nick, teaching is inseparably linked to his practice. By sharing his experience, he reformulates his own tasks and rethinks what he himself has accomplished.
3.5.2 In his courses, he brings together artistic practice, theoretical foundations, and an attentiveness to the student’s individuality.
3.5.3 Nick believes that art education should go beyond technical skills.
3.5.3.1 Its main goals are to cultivate critical thinking, the ability to formulate questions, to build dialogue, and to find one’s own visual language.
3.5.4 He is convinced that to teach means not to transmit a ready-made system of values, but to create conditions for searching: collective, vulnerable, and risky.
3.5.5 Nick encourages interdisciplinary approaches, merging painting, graphics, design, and theoretical inquiry within a single educational process.

3.6 Music
3.6.1 Nick explores the emotional and conceptual structure of music, seeking to translate its language into graphic form.
3.6.2 Music, like the visual arts, generates rhythms and tensions.
3.6.3 He believes that music and visuality exist in dialogue: each expands the perception of the other.
3.6.3.1 Nick finds in music principles for the formal organization of his visual compositions.
3.6.4 Music teaches him to perceive painting not as a static object but as a temporal process in which the viewer participates corporeally, almost physically.

4. Ethics
4.1 Nick believes that ethical questions must exist for the artist alongside aesthetic ones. Ethics imbue aesthetics with meaning.
4.1.1 He refers to Robert Motherwell, who once stated: "I believe that painter’s judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context."
4.2 Ethical reflection underlies the choice of aesthetics, while visual form expresses an inner moral stance.
4.3 Nick is convinced that authorial freedom is possible only when the artist does not renounce responsibility for what is created.
4.4 Nick holds that any artistic action contains an ethical dimension: the choice of line, color, or form is not only a matter of taste but a position toward the world.
4.4.1 This honesty of gesture transforms each of his works into an act of trust toward the viewer: the artist reveals the inner in order to awaken in the other the capacity for empathy and reflection.
4.5 Nick does not believe in beauty for its own sake: for him, beauty should carry meaning beyond appearance.
4.6 Sometimes it is precisely a sharp or radical gesture that proves most ethical, because it unsettles the viewer, forcing them to reflect.

5. Antidisciplinarity
5.1 For Nick, artistic practice is not divided into genres or disciplines—there exist only different instruments with which one can think and create.
5.2 Each new work is an inquiry in which the artist has the opportunity to articulate their vision and choose the most fitting instrument for their artistic gesture.
5.3 Nick moves material between media as if moving between the rooms of a single house.
5.3.1 Boundaries exist only in order to be crossed.
5.4 Art, in his understanding, is a unified system of meanings that exceeds the everyday, the economic, the political, and the social.
5.4.1 Works of art outlive human lives and shape long-term cultural codes.

6. Integratedness
6.1 Nick believes in the concept of integrated art, where form, color, and space interact with cultural and social contexts.
6.1.1 Art not only permeates different spheres of life but also reflects the specific states of society.
6.2 Nick is convinced that the artist can shape the reality around them, setting new rules and values.
6.2.1 He hopes that art can influence the way people think, perceive the world, and relate to culture and one another.
6.3 For this reason, he believes that artistic practice should extend beyond galleries and museums and engage with broader social and cultural spaces.
6.4 If one considers nature as a system of self-regulation, one may also assume that art can become a model of these processes, their visible projection.

7. Influence
7.1 Nick’s vision and practice would not be what they are without the influence of people—their experience and worldview—whose names are listed below (in random order).
7.1.1 Filmmakers: Ingmar Bergman, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Eugène Green, Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke, Giuseppe Tornatore, Lars von Trier, Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Wim Wenders, Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Akira Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Kim Ki-duk, Stanley Kubrick, Xavier Dolan, Paolo Sorrentino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, Albert Serra, Werner Herzog, Aleksandr Sokurov, Emir Kusturica, Sergei Parajanov.
7.1.2 Photographers: JH Engström, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anders Petersen, Daido Moriyama, Daisuke Yokota, Jacob Aue Sobol, Michael Ackerman, Jem Southam, Rinko Kawauchi, Paul Graham, Daniel Shea, Paolo Roversi, Alexander Gronsky, Andrey Bogush.
7.1.3 Artists: Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, Pablo Picasso, Walid Raad, David Ostrowski, On Kawara, Takesada Matsutani, Nam June Paik, Jiro Yoshihara, Robert Motherwell, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Alÿs, Giuseppe Penone, Paul Winstanley, Timur Novikov, Anatoly Osmolovsky, the Mono-ha movement.
7.1.3.1 And more traditional authors: Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev, Fra Angelico, Cima da Conegliano, Rogier van der Weyden, Sandro Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, El Greco, Rembrandt, Francisco de Zurbarán, Georges de La Tour, Andrew Wyeth, Aleksandr Shevchenko, Ivan Uralov.
7.1.3.2 Japanese painting: Hakuin Ekaku, Miyamoto Musashi, Kano Naonobu, Soga Shohaku.
7.1.4 Designers and studios: Stefan Sagmeister, Peter Saville, Mirko Borsche, Kasper-Florio, Actual Source, M/M (Paris), Walter Nikkels, Irma Boom, Cyan, OK-RM, Spassky Fischer, Ines Cox.
7.1.4.1 Fashion designers: Ann Demeulemeester, Ria Dunn (Lost&Found), Damir Doma, Hedi Slimane, Dries van Noten, Yohji Yamamoto, Maurizio Altieri (Carpe Diem), Nutsa Modebadze, Kazuyuki Kumagai (Attachment), Takahiro Miyashita (The Soloist, Number (N)ine), Nobuhiko Satoh (If Six Was Nine, Le Grande Bleu), Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons), Tomoaki Okaniwa (The Viridi-anne), Jun Takahashi (Undercover), Mihara Yasuhiro, Mikhail Panteleev (Volga Volga), Maison Martin Margiela, Carol Christian Poell, Raf Simons, Syngman Cucala, Demna Gvasalia, Individual Sentiments, Nicolo Ceski Bellini (Poeme Bohemien), Daisuke Nishida (Devoa), Angelo Iannello (Masnada).
7.1.5 Electronic music: Mike Paradinas, Daisuke Tanabe, Chris Clark, Andrew Turner and Ed Handley (Plaid), Ametsub, Bad Sector.
7.1.5.1 John Cage.
7.1.5.2 Songs by Nautilus Pompilius, Boris Grebenshchikov, Zemfira, Yegor Letov, Alexander Gorodnitsky, Alexander Galich, Evgeny Klyachkin, Vladimir Vysotsky, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Shocking Blue, Jozef van Wissem.
7.1.6 Writers and poets: Joseph Brodsky, Ilya Kormiltsev, Franz Kafka, Victor Pelevin.
7.1.6.1 Sacred texts: Heart Sutra, The Diamond Sutra.
7.1.7 Articles and lectures: Boris Groys, Victor Miziano, Ekaterina Degot, Alexander Pyatigorsky.
7.1.8 Philosophical ideas: Friedrich Nietzsche, Takuan Soho, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben.
7.2 Nick would be glad if his works looked the way "All Is Silence" by Ametsub sounds.

8. Important
8.1 --------------------- trials------------------------------------------------------------------------- experimentation
8.2 --------------------------------------- time and doubts --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------.
8.3 The ---------------------------------------------------------------- failures----------------------------------------------------------------------------.
8.4 The process ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- non-linear ---------------------.
8.5 This text was written by ChatGPT after a long conversation with Nick. But it’s a secret.
8.6 -------------------------------------------------------------------design of meanings--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- solutions.

9. Words
9.1 Nick perceives the word as an expressive medium equal to the image.
9.1.1 Through this, his theory and practice always exist in dialogue.
9.2 The words written here articulate Nick’s vision, his principles, convictions, and interests. They speak of him as an artist no less than images would.
9.3 Nick is also deeply grateful to all his teachers, his parents, his grandmother, V.M., friends, and colleagues.
2. Vision
2.1 For Nick, art is a way of engaging with the world, a means of reflecting on time, culture, and identity.
2.2 His practice brings together creation, theory, teaching, and research, forming a way of thinking in which visual language and textual reflection remain in constant dialogue.
2.3 His focus is directed toward processes of perception, memory, time, and identity — toward how artistic images can become containers of experience, holding both the personal and the collective.
2.4 Nick graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, which provided a technical foundation, yet his independent practice moved beyond academic frameworks toward experimental engagement with material and process.
2.5 Nick's artistic perspective has been shaped by academic training, independent practice, teaching, and ongoing engagement with international art and visual culture (see 8).
2.6 Painting, photography, graphics, and design are the media through which Nick tries to translate his vision into practice.

3. Practice
3.1 Photography
3.1.1 For Nick, photography is a field of engagement. He proceeds from the idea that meaning arises not at the moment of pressing the shutter, but within a prolonged and unpredictable material cycle.
3.1.2 He strives to bring a sense of multilayeredness, processuality, and tactility into his photographs.
3.1.3 His photographic projects articulate a dialogue with photography as a practice more connected to personal memory and emotional subjectivity than to the fixation of objective reality.
3.1.4 The figures in Nick's photographs are not models but rather co-participants, whose lives intersect with his own. His portrait series are filled with a sense of shared vulnerability, which he as author inhabits alongside them.
3.1.5 Nick thinks in terms of series, not single images. Photographs acquire meaning not individually but through their confrontation, through the tension that emerges between them.
3.1.6 He works with the book as an artistic object, where rhythm, combinations, sequence, pauses, design solutions, and tactile perception all matter.
3.1.6.1 For him, the book is a way of creating an intimate one-to-one space of dialogue between artist and viewer.
3.1.6.2 Book design is not mere packaging — it is part of its content.
3.1.7 Through his photographic practice, Nick seeks to explore the experience of duration. He approaches photographs as containers for storing time.
3.1.8 His photographs endure a "duration." Temporality is inscribed in the very fabric of the image: grain and artifacts establish a stretch of contemplation.
3.1.9 He regards print as a form of authorial voice: each mode of producing the image — from photographic paper to inkjet printing — sounds differently.

3.2 Painting
3.2.1 For Nick, painting is a process, a practice, and a form of thought. The canvas becomes a space where consciousness and gesture merge, where thought does not precede the image but emerges with it, generating new non-discursive meanings.
3.2.2 His paintings record processes of searching, hesitation, and change rather than aiming for fixed or finished forms.
3.2.3 Nick considers painting as a conversation not only with himself but with the history of art, with past and present alike.
3.2.4 His freedom lies in allowing the painting to remain fragile, imperfect, and open.
3.2.5 For him, what matters is not only the traces of the hand's movement, but also emptiness — the spaces between gestures and brushstrokes.
3.2.5.1 For Nick, this emptiness has an almost spiritual significance: within it the artist is most fully present. It becomes a site of encounter between viewer and artist, a place where personal experience acquires universal resonance.
3.2.6 For Nick, painting is not a means of arriving at answers, but a way of tracing the movement toward questions themselves — a process that remains deeply personal and marked by inner struggle.
3.2.7 Nick sees painting as a response to historical and human reality. Each work becomes a kind of reaction to time, an articulation of position, even if expressed through abstract means.

3.3 Design
3.3.1 For Nick, design is a way of speaking to the world, creating new visual metaphors and cultural codes. It is one of the languages of culture. He sees every decision as an opportunity to build a dialogue that exceeds function.
3.3.2 In each project, Nick seeks to express ideas through composition, typography, and graphic form.
3.3.2.1 Within this logic, the designer becomes a researcher, discovering new ways of looking at the familiar.
3.3.3 Nick is interested in the point of intersection between content and visual form: how the word ceases to be a transparent vehicle of meaning and begins to act on its own, as an object.
3.3.3.1 Letters and signs are not only read, but also generate atmosphere, evoke emotion, and construct a new experience of language.
3.3.3.2 Design is a way to refine the perception of the world — to make it slightly clearer, more joyful, or more profound.
3.3.4 The viewer, encountering his work, is compelled to reconstruct meanings, to find their own rhythm of reading, to interact with form as with a riddle. This is where the idea of co-authorship emerges: design ceases to be a monologue and turns into a space for the collective creation of experience.
3.3.5 Nick is convinced that design is not only a tool of communication, but also a form of cultural inquiry.
3.3.5.1 Design can serve as should be a mediator between art, media, and audience, shaping new cultural meanings.
3.3.5.2 He regards design as an instrument capable of shaping public consciousness and influencing the perception of cultural phenomena.
3.3.5.3 In this regard, every visual detail carries weight and demands careful attention.
3.3.6 Nick sees visual solutions in design as an extension of concepts, cultural contexts, and the author’s personal position.
3.3.7 Design is the ability to understand culture, society, and the psychology of perception, and to work with them through visual solutions.
3.3.8 In his view, the freedom of the designer lies not only in choosing form or color, but also in establishing new contexts, questioning dominant values, and demonstrating that communication can be unexpected, fragile, and honest.

3.4 Theory
3.4.1 Nick writes essays and texts for media on contemporary art, merging research-based and artistic perspectives.
3.4.2 His main directions include the analysis of visual practices in the post-industrial era, questions of documentary and its subversion, research on visual identity, and the ethics and philosophy of art.

3.5 Teaching
3.5.1 For Nick, teaching is inseparably linked to his practice. By sharing his experience, he reformulates his own tasks and rethinks what he himself has accomplished.
3.5.2 In his courses, he brings together artistic practice, theoretical foundations, and an attentiveness to the student’s individuality.
3.5.3 Nick believes that art education should go beyond technical skills.
3.5.3.1 Its main goals are to cultivate critical thinking, the ability to formulate questions, to build dialogue, and to find one’s own visual language.
3.5.4 He is convinced that to teach means not to transmit a ready-made system of values, but to create conditions for searching: collective, vulnerable, and risky.
3.5.5 Nick encourages interdisciplinary approaches, merging painting, graphics, design, and theoretical inquiry within a single educational process.

3.6 Music
3.6.1 Nick explores the emotional and conceptual structure of music, seeking to translate its language into graphic form.
3.6.2 Music, like the visual arts, generates rhythms and tensions.
3.6.3 He believes that music and visuality exist in dialogue: each expands the perception of the other.
3.6.3.1 Nick finds in music principles for the formal organization of his visual compositions.
3.6.4 Music teaches him to perceive painting not as a static object but as a temporal process in which the viewer participates corporeally, almost physically.

4. Ethics
4.1 Nick believes that ethical questions must exist for the artist alongside aesthetic ones. Ethics imbue aesthetics with meaning.
4.1.1 He refers to Robert Motherwell, who once stated: "I believe that painter’s judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context."
4.2 Ethical reflection underlies the choice of aesthetics, while visual form expresses an inner moral stance.
4.3 Nick is convinced that authorial freedom is possible only when the artist does not renounce responsibility for what is created.
4.4 Nick holds that any artistic action contains an ethical dimension: the choice of line, color, or form is not only a matter of taste but a position toward the world.
4.4.1 This honesty of gesture transforms each of his works into an act of trust toward the viewer: the artist reveals the inner in order to awaken in the other the capacity for empathy and reflection.
4.5 Nick does not believe in beauty for its own sake: for him, beauty should carry meaning beyond appearance.
4.6 Sometimes it is precisely a sharp or radical gesture that proves most ethical, because it unsettles the viewer, forcing them to reflect.

5. Antidisciplinarity
5.1 For Nick, artistic practice is not divided into genres or disciplines—there exist only different instruments with which one can think and create.
5.2 Each new work is an inquiry in which the artist has the opportunity to articulate their vision and choose the most fitting instrument for their artistic gesture.
5.3 Nick moves material between media as if moving between the rooms of a single house.
5.3.1 Boundaries exist only in order to be crossed.
5.4 Art, in his understanding, is a unified system of meanings that exceeds the everyday, the economic, the political, and the social.
5.4.1 Works of art outlive human lives and shape long-term cultural codes.

6. Integratedness
6.1 Nick believes in the concept of integrated art, where form, color, and space interact with cultural and social contexts.
6.1.1 Art not only permeates different spheres of life but also reflects the specific states of society.
6.2 Nick is convinced that the artist can shape the reality around them, setting new rules and values.
6.2.1 He hopes that art can influence the way people think, perceive the world, and relate to culture and one another.
6.3 For this reason, he believes that artistic practice should extend beyond galleries and museums and engage with broader social and cultural spaces.
6.4 If one considers nature as a system of self-regulation, one may also assume that art can become a model of these processes, their visible projection.

7. Influence
7.1 Nick’s vision and practice would not be what they are without the influence of people—their experience and worldview—whose names are listed below (in random order).
7.1.1 Filmmakers: Ingmar Bergman, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Eugène Green, Béla Tarr, Michael Haneke, Giuseppe Tornatore, Lars von Trier, Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Wim Wenders, Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Akira Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Kim Ki-duk, Stanley Kubrick, Xavier Dolan, Paolo Sorrentino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, Albert Serra, Werner Herzog, Aleksandr Sokurov, Emir Kusturica, Sergei Parajanov.
7.1.2 Photographers: JH Engström, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anders Petersen, Daido Moriyama, Daisuke Yokota, Jacob Aue Sobol, Michael Ackerman, Jem Southam, Rinko Kawauchi, Paul Graham, Daniel Shea, Paolo Roversi, Alexander Gronsky, Andrey Bogush.
7.1.3 Artists: Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, Pablo Picasso, Walid Raad, David Ostrowski, On Kawara, Takesada Matsutani, Nam June Paik, Jiro Yoshihara, Robert Motherwell, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Alÿs, Giuseppe Penone, Paul Winstanley, Timur Novikov, Anatoly Osmolovsky, the Mono-ha movement.
7.1.3.1 And more traditional authors: Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev, Fra Angelico, Cima da Conegliano, Rogier van der Weyden, Sandro Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, El Greco, Rembrandt, Francisco de Zurbarán, Georges de La Tour, Andrew Wyeth, Aleksandr Shevchenko, Ivan Uralov.
7.1.3.2 Japanese painting: Hakuin Ekaku, Miyamoto Musashi, Kano Naonobu, Soga Shohaku.
7.1.4 Designers and studios: Stefan Sagmeister, Peter Saville, Mirko Borsche, Kasper-Florio, Actual Source, M/M (Paris), Irma Boom, Walter Nikkels, Cyan, OK-RM, Spassky Fischer, Ines Cox.
7.1.4.1 Fashion designers: Ann Demeulemeester, Ria Dunn (Lost&Found), Damir Doma, Hedi Slimane, Dries van Noten, Yohji Yamamoto, Maurizio Altieri (Carpe Diem), Nutsa Modebadze, Kazuyuki Kumagai (Attachment), Takahiro Miyashita (The Soloist, Number (N)ine), Nobuhiko Satoh (If Six Was Nine, Le Grande Bleu), Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons), Tomoaki Okaniwa (The Viridi-anne), Jun Takahashi (Undercover), Mihara Yasuhiro, Mikhail Panteleev (Volga Volga), Maison Martin Margiela, Carol Christian Poell, Raf Simons, Syngman Cucala, Demna Gvasalia, Nicolo Ceski Bellini (Poeme Bohemien), Individual Sentiments, Daisuke Nishida (Devoa), Angelo Iannello (Masnada).
7.1.5 Electronic music: Mike Paradinas, Daisuke Tanabe, Chris Clark, Andrew Turner and Ed Handley (Plaid), Ametsub, Bad Sector.
7.1.5.1 John Cage.
7.1.5.2 Songs by Nautilus Pompilius, Boris Grebenshchikov, Zemfira, Yegor Letov, Alexander Gorodnitsky, Alexander Galich, Evgeny Klyachkin, Vladimir Vysotsky, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Shocking Blue, Jozef van Wissem.
7.1.6 Writers and poets: Joseph Brodsky, Ilya Kormiltsev, Franz Kafka, Victor Pelevin.
7.1.6.1 Sacred texts: Heart Sutra, The Diamond Sutra.
7.1.7 Articles and lectures: Boris Groys, Victor Miziano, Ekaterina Degot, Alexander Pyatigorsky.
7.1.8 Philosophical ideas: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Takuan Soho, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben.
7.2 Nick would be glad if his works looked the way "All Is Silence" by Ametsub sounds.

8. Important
8.1 --------------------- trials------------------------------------------------------------------------- experimentation
8.2 --------------------------------------- time and doubts --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------.
8.3 The -------------------------------------------------------------------failures----------------------------------------------------------------------------.
8.4 The process --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- non-linear ---------.
8.5 This text was written by ChatGPT after a long conversation with Nick. But it’s a secret.
8.6 ----------------------------------design of meanings------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ solutions.

9. Words
9.1 Nick perceives the word as an expressive medium equal to the image.
9.1.1 Through this, his theory and practice always exist in dialogue.
9.2 The words written here articulate Nick’s vision, his principles, convictions, and interests. They speak of him as an artist no less than images would.
9.3 Nick is also deeply grateful to all his teachers, his parents, his grandmother, V.M., friends, and colleagues.

website — nicktarasov.me — 103 paragraphs long — 082025 — v1.0 — 4200px