Feels heavenly, almost like love

2025 · 90 × 120 cm

Gouache on board

The work combines two important phenomena in the artist’s life, his own experience of growing up, belonging to subcultures and the local community, and an exploration of non-conformist sexuality and gender expression. It represents a typical image of a Kyiv queer teenager who attends raves on the famous Nyzhnyourkivska and K41 streets, and a listener of sasscore, a “campy” subgenre of screamo music popular in 2000s America. Originally mostly brutal and heteronormative, screamo music transformed into dance and queer-popular sasscore, passionate and unapologetic. The posterized style of the painting reminds of Andy Warhol’s Factory and cheap zine printing, a countercultural means for the manifesto and representation of the left and queer community. The image plays with the norms of masculinity and femininity, vulnerability and demonstrativeness, labels and the reclamation of slurs.