Cyrill Rafael Vasilyev

Cyrill Rafael Vasilyev (b. 1992, Moscow, Russia) is a visual artist based in The Hague, the Netherlands, working primarily with painting and installation. His practice is characterized by large-scale formats, vibrant chromatic fields, and explicit emphasis on affect and materiality. His works foreground tactile and sensory qualities and balance an embodied material encounter with staging a potential for open-ended meaning making. Cyrill’s work is informed by an engagement with the world’s contemplative traditions and addresses themes of cyclicity, flux, impermanence, embodiment, transcendence, and the dream-like, conditional nature of human experience. His subject matter emerges from pareidolic imagery and a constellation of mythopoetic, art-historical and everyday references. Through making his own paint and experimental use of materials, the agency of matter is foregrounded, allowing surfaces to register process, duration, transparency, density, and transformation.