Anton Shappo

Anton: “I don’t want my art to be liked, I want it to be understood. To succeed at any cost is not my principle”.

Originality of thinking, preciseness of views and estimates, creativity of life behaviour can be perceived in Anton upon the very first contact with him. He is the youngest of the Shappo brothers. The creative atmosphere of the family, which formed him, defined a wide range of interests and directions of the artist’s activities. Anton is the managing director of the popular Minsk tattoo studio “U Lisitsy”, a successful designer of interiors. He prefers to work on interiors of cafes, bars, restaurants, where it is possible to create an unusual theatrical atmosphere, allowing the designer to express his fantasy to the full extent in search of unexpected and extravagant solutions.

In Anton’s opinion, one of the most important tasks of an artist is to create useful works, forming the living environment of a person, producing impact on human emotions, feelings, state of mind. He admits that he would also like to work as a production designer in film and television. Anton’s typical dynamism of life and creative behaviour, his desire to “get into” different experiments is a family trait of the members of the Shappo clan. Anton says that he likes to exist in a dynamic rhythm of a “wheel” of modern life, to seek adventures – it gives energy, excites and calms down at the same time.

The beloved and essential activity of this artist, which harmonizes him, his senses and thoughts, allows him to concentrate and to fall into the creative process is painting. He is the third painter in the family, and his works bear no resemblance to the works of his father Vladimir Shappo, a well-known Belarusian painter, or his brother Pavel Shappo. This is what constitutes the value and the peculiarity of the creative family union, in which all family members are bright personalities with a highly individual view of life and art, with an original artistic manner.
In his painting experiments, as well as in other creative activities and in life in general, Anton is independent from external views and impacts. He deliberately ruins classical canons of painting, looks for unexpected solutions. His works should be called art-objects rather than paintings in a traditional sense of the word. They can be performed on a canvas or a piece of plywood with some paper glued to them. The artist mixes colours, paints with oil, acrylic, sometimes adding even watercolours. He is fond of general decorative effect of colour and plastic solutions, therefore he denies illusive spatiality of compositions, introduces ornamental patterns, uses local colours and clear graphic drawing, working thoroughly on all details and fragments of objects and figures. Anton cares a lot about the texture of surfaces, masterful “elaboration” and technical completeness of a work in all its elements. Frames, which he always makes with his own hands, are not an addition or decoration, but an integral part of the ideological and figurative concepts of his paintings-objects.

In these artworks Anton’s presence is obvious: his melancholy, irony, love, chaos, passion. A distinctive feature of his artistic style is a reformatting of certain life events, impressions from travelling, meetings, encounters with previously unknown perceptions of the world: new smells, tastes, sounds – into images, which are remote from everyday reality, romantic in their strange exoticism. These aspirations of the artist are brightly expressed in the works of the cycle “FLESH” (2015) and “1+6” (2016) with their allegoric nature, parabolic themes, plots, images. They embody the artist’s boyish passion to travel in time and space, mature inclination to philosophical thoughts about a human being and the world, his bent for a metaphorical pictorial language. These tendencies can be seen in his other works, the content of which is more private and lyrical. In the “calm” and tender picture “Tango and a plaid”, the artist creates an expressive image of Love taking a simple life episode. His desire to protect a beloved woman from cold, wrapping her in a warm plaid, takes a deeper meaning, when it is understood as a wish to protect her from the “cold” of all life adversities.