"There will be a variety of reflections on the topic of power and its search."

Alexander Krylov about his exhibition, tattoos "For the Airborne Forces!" and video games

My dad played a role in my becoming an artist. He himself could have been accepted into architecture for one drawing, but he said that he would not study with nerds — and chose a slightly different path. But he was a man who had been painting next to me since I was a child. He didn't teach me, but he kept showing me something, sketching something. Also, drawing was the most effective way to shut me up. It's impossible to trace the beginning when I started drawing — I was always with a pencil, a pen, drawing something.

I have a creative story against all odds. At school, they kept saying, what are you doing, painting? Are you going to make money with this? Go learn math (although there's nothing wrong with math). But no matter what happens, I will draw. At the same time, at school I denied any art: I painted graffiti, defaced walls, beat tattoos to all sorts of airborne troops. I remember one of them came and asked me to fill in the phrase "For the Airborne Forces" with some kind of stupid sketch with an hourglass. I filled up, he paid, went to the kitchen, took the chebupels out of his briefcase and started cooking them in my kitchen. It was very strange.… But in general, all the customers were satisfied.

I am very glad that I got a design education. I graduated from the Moscow University of the Humanities to study design. Graphic artist Elbrus Tsogoev looked at my work and said, "He's an artist, we need to take him!" and they took me. In fact, such an education is closer to modern art than any art education. You practice composition, and you watch a variety of techniques, and collage, and drawing, and you go through different materials. Now graphic design is a little further away from modern art — they are sitting on computers, there is no drawing. I got an old-school design education, and I literally broke into the last carriage. We even had a sculpture.

When I was already studying design, I started working with my dad. It was Marusya Sevastyanova who brought me to her. She says very harshly, "Come on, write to Bata." So I sat down and wrote. Well, Dad sat down, and I sat down... it turned out to be an amazing portrait, psychological, I worked through all my gestalts through it. Work and art should carry the idea of uplifting the spirit, which makes you live, find your own direction in life. This is much closer to me than the sublimation of my injuries, I realized this from working with dad — which, in general, was the only such job.

Dad then asked why he [in the picture] was wearing diapers, got offended, didn't talk to me for a year, then called and said, "Thank you, son, for fitting." The painting is in Brooklyn now, and we haven't been able to return it [after the exhibition at the DorDor Gallery] for two years now.… And Dad himself lives in Belyaevo. And the work is called "Pit Bull from Belyaevo".

The exhibition at the Nakovalnya "S I L A". Thinking about the word "power", I was looking for where and what it is, how to designate it. And I came to the conclusion that strength represents good intentions, love, and acceptance. And the correct interpretation of what is happening around you gives you strength in itself. But there will never be an accurate description of what power is, because power has different manifestations and they always depend on the circumstances that surround us. At the exhibition, power is revealed from different sides. Somewhere I laughed at her, somewhere I wrote an ode to generations, women, mothers, myself. There will be a wide variety of reflections on the topic of power and its search — and whether there is a point in this search. As a result, power remains just a word — based on the meanings of consonant words in Sanskrit and Pali, which have actually been lost for a long time, it dawned on me that this is nothing but a word, and real power is difficult to describe in words, only to show it in different ways. At the exhibition, I show a lot of physical strength, but this is a statement about something deeper - that those ancient languages may have spoken.

I often don't understand some plot component of my work, I work on a feeling, and when it is achieved, I stop working. The main thing in the work is the feeling of it, its interpretation, and I approach it as a viewer, the author is dead, and all that.

All these diamonds and pluses in the paintings are in many ways a story about design. Initially, I just liked this diamond, diamonds. It's a very good compositional element, it's beautiful — and there's no more explanation for it, just a cool game with form. Then my design thinking cut corners for him, and it turned out to be a plus. And I liked the story so much that you can get the benefits without taking any components away. There is a metaphor for something so positive here. And I started leaving this form everywhere until I got tired of it.

Tin in paintings is because it's cool to work with different materials, that's all. But the coolest material in the world for me is acrylic. These are all paints together: I added a solvent — it looks like oil, I added water — watercolor, a thickener — it looks like gouache. Well, just like acrylic. Actually, it's great, I'm very happy every time I work with him.

Right now I'm interested in sound, but not specifically sound art or a particular direction, I just want to work with it. I do not know why I need it now, but I am interested in it and I am sure that when I master it, I will be able to apply it in my work. It's the same with wood carving — I started out in a frenzy, cutting some sticks, back and forth, and realized at some point that I had learned how to carve wood and a new medium was available to me.

I'm using green very actively right now. On Instagram, a couple of weeks ago, they made a basic story with a green color. And I caught myself thinking that I had visually stolen this story! I think we're all susceptible to Pantone jokes about color, and I'm especially so. You can't get around your design background. When I display colors in some kind of branding, I often think: I'll take a pantone. It's convenient — it looks good both on the screen and on print, and that's the joke.

I've been drawing and drawing on my computer, but it doesn't live. When you look at a work in a physical format and touch it with your hands… With all my love for digital, any sculpture or canvas with graphics is 2-3 times more exciting than the coolest CG. Because it really exists.

Some of my works refer to the gaming field. I love video games— and anime. I grew up watching anime, and I think it's an amazing story to bring up a real person. My favorite genre is senen, where the main character goes through a difficult path, making friends and defeating all the freaks and difficulties. I really like "Blade cleaving demons", and of course, all these "Bleaches", "Van pisi".

I'm a fierce RPG fan, and as a child I really loved playing the villain. One of my favorite childhood games was the first Fable, and my character always had huge horns there, and flies were flying around him. Mom was aware of how everything was arranged there, came up and wailed: What did you do there? And there I... cheated on my wife, killed someone, robbed everyone! Of course, I also played a lot in Elder Scrolls — Oblivion, Morrowind, Skyrim. Moreover, at some point I realized that my conscience does not allow me to kill or attack someone even in the game, and I went through all these games as a "good" hero.

One of my favorite games in general is Dark Souls. I often use it in teaching as an example of cool game design. The bottom line is that you're constantly dying in it, from every enemy you meet. And you learn to go through her through these deaths. There's no other way. And the plot doesn't develop in the format you're used to: here's a mission for you, here's a quest for you — there's no such thing. No one shows or tells anything, they say, bring me the severed fingers, but where the hell are they? It's so... realistic! There are no clear instructions, they are then written by the players themselves — what to do, what to download. And every time a new part is released, all the players re-******* (violently experiencing what is happening in the game) and die millions of times. I love this vibe — I never read forums and guides on how-to-assemble-the-most—powerful-character - I want to explore everything myself.

I don't think gaming is a waste of time. Here's someone sitting and watching TV shows. No one in your life will tell you that you're a fool and wasting your life. Rather, they start asking if you've watched this or that series. You kill an hour every night to watch a new episode, and that's okay. And if you spend an hour to complete a level or just visit some [virtual] world, then you are a non-selective, underdeveloped, some kind of strange person who is wasting his life. But in the series, you can't even influence anything... Games are the past, present and future, this is what awaits us sooner or later - not now, of course, for another 20-30 years this whole "Metaverse" will be shit — but in the future. Everything in the world is variable, and everything around it can be influenced. In my painting, I do the same thing — I leave the subjects variable. There is a message in the feeling format, I have to figure out the rest myself.

As a designer and illustrator, I perfectly understand all new technologies, I understand why computer graphics are needed, how much it costs, how it is made and for what purpose. I understand NFT, why they buy them and how it works, I have already been offered to do it forty times. But there's this grandfather in my soul who sits there and says, man, we need some kind of material. I like that my work, regardless of fires and physical losses, can take many centuries and remain in reality next to me. But when I look at the work in digital format, it seems to me that we are not old enough for them to play so well as real objects. I'll be happy to get into it later when the picture suits me so that I say wow and stay on it for a long time, and not just scroll through. And for me, the digital format is coolly perceived as a reinforcement of some additional work. We had a performance with Rinat Mustafin where we painted models with light. Or there was an artist who collected installations from garbage and then brought them to life as NFT and sold them. That's what I got. But 40 monkeys somehow don't. At the same time, I recognize the whole digital, I am delighted with the tridashniks. But I don't understand why it doesn't suit me, but the desire to work with the material is static and nothing has interrupted it yet.

But for now, I want my work to be in physical shape. Maybe someday it will come to the point where the work in physical and digital will not be different, when we are already "uploaded" somewhere there, then there will be no difference - and it will be absolutely fine, but we are going far.…

And I like the complexity of working with the material. Look how dirty I am... I really like this process at the level of smells and tactile sensations. And if you did something wrong, then you either save it in a roundabout way, or you throw it away. It's very tempting to me that you can't roll back. I made a line with charcoal or a marker — you can't erase everything yet.