Bokeh effect or a Serious confetti

Stepan Krasnov started his creative career in 1997 making street art. Nowadays he is one of the representatives of the neo-pointillism technique. As Stepan describes it himself:

«it’s like a bokeh effect in photo when the picture is completely in defocus»

He believes that with this new nobel visual language he is able to talk and make think even people of the 21st century with their new digitized thinking and perception.

His creative career began on the street, when Stepan got acquainted with graffiti. Nowadays he still leaves various colorful tags in public spaces. He was into hip-hop culture, but quickly realized that he was not very interested in just leaving messages, and he began to make conceptual drawings.

Later, Stepan came around Liechtenstein’s style. Pop art was an important step for Stepan, because it was understood by everyone as often an image is much more comprehensible than an inscription or an abstract composition. Using the comics’s language, Stepan and his associates drew attention to everyday life situations, drawing the public’s attention to important bruning messages of modern life.

Currently, Stepan works in a neo-pointillist style. He was fascinated by the semantics of pointillism, when all artist needs is points and imagination, when abstraction can convey any narrative, no matter how contradictory it may sound. At some point, he switched from pop art to neo-pointillism, because despite all the experiments in terms of plots and collaborations of pop art with other styles, he became cramped in one direction and decided to go further. Pointillism opened up new colors, shapes, and subjects for him, and now he can and wants to surprise the audience with the complex simplicity of his works.

He calls his direction neo-pointillism or “digitalized fine art”. Fine arts should develop along with the centuries. If for Georges Seurat it was pointillism, which makes a picture, comprising smallest points, but for Krasnov, points are pixels that are not always perceptible to the human eye and then new technologies come into play. To understand his most blurry pictures, just point your phone’s camera at them!

Street art’s influences are still reflected in his work, as often in his paintings Stepan uses tools of graffiti culture, like cans with paint, with which he makes his “pixels”.

In a desire to match the spirit of the time, Stepan even came to such a format as abstract canvases. He wants to revitalize, modernize painting, looking for new forms and variations of what you can put your message on. He creates his works on imitations of canvas: it can be countertops, covers, bags, sofa upholstery and much more.

Stepan’s main goal was and remains to make people think, encouraging his spectators to reflect on their own life and on the modern world. To make the modern viewer think, you need to speak their language, which is exactly what Stepan does, finding new forms and ways of dialogue between the picture and the audience’s perception.

«The main task of art is to prick or make the viewer think about something, to make the audience move in some direction, and in fact, no matter in what direction, it just has to touch, cause some reaction, good or bad».

In his steer art compositions he does not want to interfere with viewer’s thoughts so much that he stopped signing his public works to only make people think and dream.

All stories in Stepan’s pieces are his real life stories. He finds inspiration in life and people. He wants to bring his spectator into the dialogue about essential things, but in a beautiful, light language that does not drive them into fear.

«My work is like confetti, confetti about serious things».