Participating in exhibitions:
2012 Solo exhibition “Hippopart”. The Ploschad Mira Museum Center. Krasnoyarsk, Russia

A MILESTONE IN THE CREATION OF ART:
Rostan Tavasiev creates his most famous painting method based on the phenomenon of play – “hippopart”. A stuffed toy replaces a brush, a pallet-knife, a paint roller and even an airbrush, and after the painting is completed it remains as part of the canvas. The toy becomes not only a character, but in a sense the author of the painting. And while making the painting, it is constantly in the air.
One of the first paintings of “hippopart” is in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery.

The first sketch of an abstract stuffed toy painting was made by me in Paris, at the Rue Hôtel de Ville, in the hospitable residence of Cité des Arts, in the summer of 2005. Since then, I have been thinking. Drawing sketches and thinking again. And finally, in the late rainy autumn of the last year, while at my country house in Abramtsevo, I stopped thinking, took a hare, dipped it in paint and ran it across the canvas. What I saw seemed curious. Suspended time, frozen movement, like an abstract painting, but if you leave the toy on the canvas, then here it is – quite a figurative character, forever stuck to the canvas between the past and the future, like a Mesozoic mosquito frozen in a piece of amber. And this character is also a bit of the author of the painting.

The history of art flashed before my eyes in an instant: cave paintings turning a natural rock hillock into a buffalo, Egyptian frescoes with a linear flow of the plot and a trail of hieroglyphs stretching behind the protagonist, assemblages by Silkovsky (the history of art appeared out of order). Some ancient altar with the reliefs of sacrificial animals, irrigated with the blood of the same animals on holidays, flashed brightly in the memory, then Kandinsky appeared with his “Spiritual in Art”, talking about colour and form in painting. Italian Futurism, striving to depict all stages of movement at once, was rapidly emerging. Osmolovsky, crawling along the Triumphal Square, Paul McCartney, also crawling, but on the floor, and rubbing paint on himself, for some reason Kabakov’s installation about a man who flew into space flashed, and the last to blush was Yves Klein, forcing (perhaps even for money) naked girls, covered in “international blue” to touch the canvas…. But the maidens always leave, and the hares stay!!!! Having clearly realised that throughout its history mankind had been heading towards this discovery I had accidentally made, I simply had no right to abandon my experiment.

For the next few months I worked hard and with great pleasure.
With every new canvas, new possibilities and new horizons opened up. I learnt from my acquaintances, who were in some way close to chemistry, that acrylic paints and polyester, which the toys are made of and 60% of the canvas, have a very close chemical nature. I don’t know why, but it gave me new strength and confidence in the rightness of the chosen path.

Rostan Tavasiev