Ivan Simonov
Since 2016, Ivan Simonov, who became famous for his street project under the hashtag #smallpeople, has been integrating small-format photographs of people printed in black and white into the urban environment using an ordinary office printer. All of them are heroes of documentary photographs taken by the artist on the streets of the city - homeless people and people of "suspicious" appearance, police officers, road workers, old people, in a word - ordinary, unremarkable, "little people".
The artist snatches the characters out of reality using a photographic lens and after a while brings them back to reality, focusing on the loneliness, fragility and defenselessness of figures due to the contrast of the urban environment and the fragility of paper, the scale of the wall and the size of the picture.
Ivan's works are often complemented by the text, which acts as a commentary on the depicted, supplementing or changing its meaning. He plays with the viewer's imagination with everyday, established expressions or speech paradoxes, leaving them free to interpret. Each work reflects different manifestations of the man and the environment in which he exists.
