ORELART PARIS Art Contemporain Russe et International

“To become a real Hasidim - you have to be a real anarchist.

“To be a real anarchist - you have to become agnostic. And Hasidim”

V. Chtak

Following the "Moscopolis” group exhibition at Espace Louis Vuitton, young Russian artist Valery Chtak is back in France with his first individual exhibition at Galerie Orel Art.

At the age of 16, Chtak was initiated into art at the informal school of contemporary art that artist Avdei-Ter-Oganyan set up for his son’s friends. He became involved in the iconoclastic activities that spurred Ter-Oganyan to take exile in 1999 - it was then that the Radek group formed and was hosted by Alexei Kallima in his non-profit gallery named “France”. The group regularly organised “situationist” events (in reference to Guy Debord, whom Osmolovsky translated), such as the “demonstration” in 2000 where they brandished banners with nonsensical slogans.

His career as an independent artist started with pots of black and white paint and Joseph Beuys as a character model. Like Beuys, he wears a head-covering, lives his life as art and pursues his personal obsessions, while allowing the spectator - the ultimate artist - a great deal of freedom of interpretation. Taking inspiration from Basquiat’s graffiti, he smothers walls and boxes with cryptograms, fetish objects and figures, mystic numbers, kabalistic drawings, and Cyrillic or Latin writing in various languages. His canvases gather on the gallery walls in skewed polyptychs and construct an anxious, chaotic narrative.

His exhibition at Galerie Orel Art is presented as an installation in which the enigmatic language of his canvases is complemented by real objects reworked by the artist. The paintings, drawings, furniture and other objects narrate Chtak's chaotic world, his refrains and code-like repetitions.