Bad Taste Painting

APL315 is the pseudonym of one of the most distinctive personalities representing the young generation of artists in the sphere of contemporary Ukrainian art. He spent his young years in Ukraine, these days he travels and makes art all around the world. He has been active in the field of graffiti since 2000. His work can be found not only in Ukraine, but also more or less right across Europe and even in the Far East, in South Korea. A typical feature of street art is its mutability and temporariness, which is why APL315 is happiest when painting the wagons of goods trains which, given that they travel vast distances, offer a reach for the ‘exhibition’ of his works which is potentially far wider than that of any gallery or museum.   Since 2006 or thereabouts, APL315 has also shown his works in galleries. He refuses to paint murals at exhibitions, though. He most often creates his works on loosely stretched, large-format canvases. At times, he turns to smaller formats, painting on paper. However, the techniques he employs are always drawn from graffiti. He mixes various types of paints, such as oil and acrylic or aerosol and marker pen. At times, he creates sculptures, using readily available materials like planks of wood, wire, sticky tape, foil and paper; these sculptures are a three-dimensional materialisations of his graffiti. Fairly recently, he also began creating drawings in the form of tattoos.   APL315 has unquestionably developed his own individual, original, inimitable painterly language; his works are predatory, raw, provocative and critical of the reality around him and he continually experiments with the form of the image and texture of the surface. An entymologist by education, he openly admits that his great inspiration is the world of insects. The biomorphic forms of his predominantly abstract compositions are often inspired by his observations of the shapes and colours of that world, but what also interests him is the collective behaviour of insect communities, which he compares directly with human behaviour.