Slava Vorontsov
Beauty That Bleeds
Text by Elina Poliakova //
Someone likes to watch / someone likes to show. There’s a pretty French word with a sultry meaning for this — voyeurism. Black as mazut (Russian for a heavy, tar-like fuel oil — the word for industrial sludge), sweet as a melted candy sensation. The feeling of witnessing something that wasn’t meant for our eyes. And still, we can’t take our eyes off of it.
Slava’s work traps you in that exact manner. The moment your gaze slips across his large-scale paintings — dense, almost viscous. They carry a sense of physicality, of resistance. Of layered meanings thick with emotional sediment.
He confronts both shared and intimate questions through a choreographed entropy of brushstrokes, gestures unfiltered — painted with a primal, almost animal force. His canvases flicker between figuration and collapse.
Sacred one moment, grotesque the next. What emerges are not answers, but atmospheres — rituals of undoing, confrontations with flesh and memory.
ARTWORK 「pizda (origine de l’origine du monde)」diptych, 2024,
canvas, acrylic, oil pastel, 280 x 200
Exhibition view, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts
Courtesy of the artist.
Take la mort de vénus: a raw, visceral undoing of Cabanel’s Birth. Where the classic Venus floated in purity, Slava’s is breaking down. Fragmented, decaying, devoured by color and force. No longer a goddess of desire — but of rot, of entropy. Painted with violent strokes and heavy textures, it’s a body pulled back down to matter. A critique of idealism, yes, but also a ritual: this is what happens when we stop pretending beauty doesn’t bleed.
In another work pizda (origine de l’origine du monde), he references Courbet’s infamous Origin of the World, but instead of a singular erotic gaze, Slava brings in Mitochondrial Eve. Ancestral Blackness. Genetics, anthropology, archaeology — everything pointing to the same truth: the origin was never white. This painting becomes an undoing and a reclaiming all at once.
petite révolution (josephine), is dedicated to Josephine Loiselle, a 19th-century Parisian dancer of short stature. Here, her body becomes monumental. The black background frames her defiant pose as a rejection of aesthetic normativity. She is all confidence, all force, breaking through the shadow.
cyclisme plays with loops — of nature, migration, decay, and rebirth. It’s about movement across space and identity. Uprooting, adapting, reforming. Becoming something new before even understanding what was lost.
And then voyeurisme. A painting as mirror, but cracked. Watching oneself as if through another’s eyes. Moving to a new place, facing unknown conditions — and seeing unfamiliar parts of your own essence reflected back. In this work, voyeurism becomes a metaphor for intimacy with oneself. A transformation watched in real time.
I am particularly fascinated by contrasts—both in subject matter and technique. My paintings often delve into visceral themes such as scatological imagery and sexuality,
incorporating elements from rock culture, tattoo motifs,
and mythological figures.
ARTWORK 「autoportrait d'une autre personne 」2024. canvas, acrylic, airbrush, spray paint,
charcoal, oil pastel, 150 x 190
Courtesy of the artist.
ARTWORK 「la mort de vénus 」2025. canvas, acrylic, spray paint, oil pastel, oil stick, 199,5 x 172,5
Courtesy of the artist.
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ARTWORK 「petite révolution (josephine) 」2025. canvas, acrylic, oil pastel, 134 x 194
Courtesy of the artist.
ARTWORK 「voyeurisme 」2024. canvas, acrylic, charcoal, airbrush, oil pastel, 80 x 80
Courtesy of the artist.
One of his paintings is called a self-portrait of another person. That’s what I felt flipping through his workbooks, playing with the paper corners, while the murmuring of the Parisian street outside mixed with explanations dressed in Slava’s calm voice. A rare sensation of being an object, a subject, and a witness — all at once.
Made between 2023 and 2025, drawings in his albums stand apart — not as studies or leftovers, but as a parallel space. A3-sized pages filled with airbrush, charcoal, oil pastels, pencil. The technique is layered, the tone more internal. Characters appear and dissolve. Mythological figures, fragments of bodies, forms in motion.
They feel less like scenes, more like states. Each one its own exploration — some tender, some more violent. The drawings carry a different intimacy, like looking through a keyhole at something unfolding just for itself.
No staging. No narrative. Just the quiet violence of looking.
A child’s curiosity with an adult’s precision.
The world, undone — and stitched back with different threads.
//
FIN