Vova Ostrovsky

Year of birth: 1994.
Where do you live: Bulgaria, Israel, Russia.
Describe your art in three words: authentic ,expressive, nostalgic.
Your discipline: Oil painting, music, photography.
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Vladimir, your artistic journey began with a music project under the pseudonym Jezup. How did that transition from music to visual art come about, and how do the two forms of expression influence each other in your work?

While working on my music project in Moscow, I was fully immersed in the process. When I moved to Israel, I found myself in a completely new environment — without my usual instruments, but still with a ipad and hands eager to create. Character animation, especially in the form of music videos, naturally became the next step in my creative path. For me, drawing is not just a skill, but a way to feel, reflect, and find harmony within. Sketching — whether for music video ideas, storyboards, or simply for myself — has always been a form of therapy, a reflection of my inner rhythm. Over time, it evolved into a craft of its own.

Your art often appears to delve deep into personal and universal themes. Could you share some of the underlying concepts or emotions that inspire your pieces?

In my art, I often explore personal themes and emotions. Sometimes it’s a romanticized melancholy of solitude, other times it’s the stoic calmness of confronting an inner fire. And sometimes, it’s just simple everyday scenes — like a group of young people gathered in a kitchen inside a Soviet-era apartment block, surrounded by identical buildings. In Russia, these kitchens have always been the heart of open and carefree gatherings, where people make toasts and share drinks. For me, it’s a direct reference to the cultural code I grew up with.

The way you use colors and create poster-style artworks suggests a certain energy or message. How do you decide on the color palette for each piece, and what do you hope to convey through these choices?

Since the early days when I was working with photography and video, I’ve always felt that color is one of the most essential tools for expressing mood and emotion. Color correction practically became my second nature . Later, as I began working with oil paints, I discovered glazing techniques — which, to my surprise, felt very similar to what I was already doing in digital media- similar to layering filters. In both cases, I aim to create a slightly surreal world through color, sometimes flat, sometimes deeper, depending on the atmosphere I want to evoke.

Your work seems to bridge different artistic realms. How do you see the relationship between your past music project and your current art practice? Are there any similarities in the creative process?

The connection between my visual art and music is tight. While working on album covers, I learned how to merge visual and sound worlds — where images and music become a continuation of one another. My visual style actually began forming even before music, but it was music, together with drawing, that helped shape and structure it. The creative process is also similar in many ways. Sometimes, I approach brushstrokes much like playing guitar — especially in dirty blues, where a slide glides over the strings, creating accidental but lively overtones. It’s about creating a space where I can let go of control and allow the process to breathe on its own. However, when it comes to characters, I work them out more carefully during the sketching stage on my ipad. Music constantly inspires me to search for new ways to express myself visually, and this organic fusion of the two worlds has become an essential part of my practice.

You’ve lived in various countries, including Russia, Bulgaria, and Israel. How have these cultural shifts influenced your art and the themes you explore?

Russia laid the foundation for my artistic language, but Israel was where I went through a transformation, bringing together all the experience I had accumulated. Later, after meeting my wife, I found myself in Bulgaria, where I was finally able to establish a steady process of creating oil paintings. It’s hard to say that these countries changed the core of my art, but certain works definitely reference events and impressions from these places. For example, Letter of a Repatriate is filled with nostalgia for my homeland, while Freelancer in Israel depicts an artist calmly working as bombs explode outside the window — a direct reflection of my experience there. Bulgaria, for me, is always my muse — my wife — who endlessly inspires my work as well.

Your work has a certain abstract and surrealist quality. How do you balance the abstract with the figurative in your paintings? Is there a specific intention behind this approach?

I try to find a balance between abstraction and figuration by focusing on what feels right rather than defining everything too much. I’m especially interested in the moment when a figure starts to dissolve into abstraction—it creates a sense of movement and fluidity When creating characters, I sometimes exaggerate, exploring the human body through my own prism. As someone who has always loved sports, I have a deep admiration for the human form, but I like to distort it — stretching limbs, elongating skulls, leading the anatomy closer to something primal and ancient I place my figures in dreamlike spaces, keeping details minimal so that color, brushwork, and texture do the storytelling. My goal is to keep things balanced, expressive, and alive while saying more with less.

You mention wanting to open up and deepen the universe of Jezup. How does your visual art serve as an extension of that universe, and what do you want viewers to experience or feel when interacting with your work?

Today, the Jezup universe is already an established narrative style for me, where I bring together all of my accumulated experience and give life to my own visual language using oil paints. It’s a space where I blend my love for artistic references with the cultural code of my generation — creating a space that establishes a connection between me and the viewer. With every new project, I continue exploring new horizons, diving into the subconscious and expressing it through intuitive images. I want viewers to see the human body from a new perspective — emphasizing its primitive, primal beauty. I want them to be immersed in a haze of nostalgic memories and fragments of early 2000s pop culture, transformed through the lens of retrospection. I hope they will also feel the atmosphere of my hometown — with its unique blend of eras and cultural contradictions — but through it all, they’ll encounter universal elements of the human experience, that familiar sense of home that everyone can recognize in their own way.