You can close yourself off from yourself by planning reasoned art, even if you live in a city of 12 million people like Moscow, and you can do it at the same time by drawing inspiration from the city itself and from a landscape where the borders are far apart and everything remains still for many kilometres. Shozy started out in the Russian capital and has no intention of ever leaving, guided in his creative thinking by a father who knows music and a mother who loves art.
The streets have inspired Shozy’s production, born as a street artist in a city where competition between writers is extremely high. Graffiti is one of the artist’s most interesting productions, although he himself considers it to be a pastime, a comfort zone in which he can take refuge and find himself. Architectural optical effects, focal deceptions and more old school writing, with a recurring obsession with plastic, packaging and waste, often punctured and torn.
For Shozy, the physical experience of living in Russia is a fundamental part of his work. His decision not to move is explained in a video interview in which he explains how he is stimulated in a healthy way by the landscape and the ease with which the same landmarks can be found thousands of kilometres away. The depression and melancholy that are often associated with that particular climate and landscape are also part of the tools needed to develop a language of the inner self. Solitude is important for Shozy because it allows him to concentrate his energies on the why and the how of developing a stimulus, it allows him not to have to explain reasons for his work that people put in the background in favour of stereotypes linked to the figure of the artist.
The work on the walls or canvas is a very reasoned production, not linked to extemporaneous creativity or psychedelic ecstasies, but a complex discourse in which communication plays an important role and precedes the work.
