TRAJECTORY

Vlas Kuzma is an artist of confrontation and transformation, working at the intersection of performance and abstract art. Rooted in the heritage of exile and historical trauma, he creates spaces where presence becomes a form of shared sensitivity. Kuzma defines his artistic method as Radical Sincerity — an aesthetic of vulnerability and resistance, transforming intimate traces into abstract artifacts that challenge the boundaries of art. His gestures reach the edges of history, identity, and exile, turning fragility into an act of revolt.

BIOGRAPHY

Vlas Kuzma was born in Yoshkar-Ola in 1988, into a family marked by the legacy of Stalin-era repressions. He came of age in Moscow amid the collapse of ideologies and the search for new forms of meaning. Confronting the authoritarian climate of his youth, he abandoned a career in law to avoid becoming an atom within the regime, turning instead to independent artistic experimentation — across painting, poetry, music, and krump — outside institutional frameworks.

Committed to the ideas of freedom and cosmopolitanism, he moved to New York, where he found a new sense of identity and developed a language that merged the Eastern European tradition of performance with the influences of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism — establishing a bridge between the material and the metaphysical.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kuzma returned to Russia to undertake what he calls a “demarche of conscience” — an act of anti-war resistance. His performances, grounded in ethical defiance and vulnerability, led to political persecution. France subsequently granted him political asylum, allowing him to continue advancing his artistic practice.

Today, Vlas Kuzma lives and works in France, pursuing Radical Sincerity — a method of transforming intimate experience into shared symbolic and abstract forms. His works have been presented on international platforms and in collaboration with art centers and institutions.

ART PRACTICE

The history of abstract art in the twentieth century was a history of liberation. From the void of Suprematism to the gestural torrents and the color fields, painters sought to abandon representation in favor of states, energies, and atmospheres.

Yet this liberation carried an exile: abstraction lost its flesh. It became a realm of spirit, and pure form but abandoned matter, intimacy, and living presence.

It is precisely here that Vlas Kuzma begins his statement. His practice is an infusion of matter and blood into abstraction. In his canvases, there is no representation, but an alchemy of presence — tears, ashes, earth, and blood; fragments of ritual and shards of history sealed beneath layers of paint.

By combining performance and abstract painting, he creates works that oscillate between confession and monument — a harmony that reaches beyond the image.

In Kuzma’s hands, painting ceases to be merely a surface for visual experience. It becomes a postsecular icon, where the sacred arises not from dogma but from living presence and transformation.

Kuzma’s works represent a new stage in abstraction — performative abstraction. In doing so, Vlas Kuzma restores to abstraction what it had long abandoned — its flesh.