Yuri Shtapakov - TABOO

The work of Yuri Shtapakov is distinguished by a special property - the emphasis is not on the result, as they are used to in St. Petersburg, but on the process, in Bergsonian style - on duration. The author himself needs such activity: an endless act of self-awareness as an artist and transmission of this to others. In other words, Shtapakov’s works without an author do not reveal a significant part of their charisma, they lose their performative perspective. Drying up, they open twilight worlds in the style of Dostoevsky’s novels, twists of the soul, rushing between the ecstatic delight of a kleptomaniac and the self-flagellation of a sinner, ambition and humiliation. The way of the artist appears as flour; there is nothing cheerful and light in it: painful eros, squeezed thanatos, and the endless wailing of a soldier languishing at his post from boredom and cutting with a knife on the lintel "dmb 81".

Traces of human stories are the most powerful trigger that starts the machine of creativity both in life and in art. Abrasion, stains, marks, prints / hence the love for printed graphics and archeology / - these are the materials and co-authors of Yuri Shtapakov. Selflessly rushing into the whirlpool of his own and collective memory, the artist manages to discern a spark among the layers, and kindle the flame of art from it with diligence and love. The thing that fell into the hands of Shtapakov will come out different or not come out at all: it will be conserved, freeze like a fly in amber, like an interviewed witness of the era.

Soviet visuality has been woven into Shtapakov’s poetics since the days of his work as an artist in the Yubileiny department store. The routine inherent in this kind of activity has not turned, as with Kabakov, into a conceptual device, but is constantly being implemented as a repetitive postmodernist game. Art ready to be reduced to a recognizable icon, an idol stencil, a standard nameplate, text punched into a metal surface; a memory of Soviet Atlantis, which left behind a cult of maniacal numbering, accounting, accounting books, certificates, letters and the whole world of a small person, devoid of everything material, except for badges of honor and empty bottles.

Peter Bely

In the novel The Pit, Andrei Platonov briefly and accurately described the artistic method that Yuri Shtapakov began to use years later. “A dead, fallen leaf lay next to Voshchev’s head, it was brought by the wind from a distant tree, and now this leaf was to face humility in the earth. Voshchev picked up the withered leaf and hid it in the secret compartment of the sack, where he saved all sorts of objects of misfortune and obscurity. “You did not have the meaning of life,” Voshchev thought with avarice of sympathy, “lie here, I will find out what you lived and died for. Since no one needs you and you are lying around in the middle of the whole world, then I will keep and remember you.

Slivers, boards, knots, decayed canvases of nameless authors, junk and junk of all stripes, from antique shards to advertising posters from the 90s - these are the very “objects of misfortune and obscurity” with which the artist feels connected, collects, stores, admires, peers. As a medium who has taken the thing of the deceased in his hands, comes into contact with him and allows him to speak through himself, Shtapakov, shifting his treasures, sometimes gives them a voice, sees in them a desire to speak out.

A ghostly whisper conveys different sounds: from salty witticism to the strangled curses of the victims of repression, from sarcastic anecdotes to a mournful list of losses, from a lambada to a blockade metronome. This dispersion is embarrassing: as if the artist cannot find his theme and rushes about with the same zeal between any random ideas and images. There is no need to be embarrassed - Shtapakov’s navigator does not fail. His memory really equalizes the Iliad and a children’s obscene rhyme, a portrait of a deceased friend, a famous writer, a Soviet singer or a living drinking companion. All of them are equally subject to the passage of time, all need to be kept and remembered.

Alexander Dashevsky