Because apparently men have always been worth painting

Stillness.
Closed eyes.
Wet hair.
Bare skin.
The world rushing around him.
He doesn’t seem to care.
There is something beautiful about that.
Perhaps it is the vulnerability.
Perhaps it is the arrogance of youth.
Or perhaps
I simply want to lie beside him
and watch the world disappear.

There’s something about Shadko’s paintings that blurs reality with imagination.

The longer I look, the more I see.

And sometimes I wonder if I am seeing something that nobody else sees.

Shadko is a Belarusian artist living and working in Warsaw. His paintings begin with images — photographs, social media, something glimpsed online, something that catches his eye. He takes these fragments and passes them through himself. He studies them. Distorts them. Reimagines them.

Nothing remains quite as it was.

His paintings are often about faces and bodies. Youth. Vulnerability. Isolation. That strange fragility of adolescence.

His figures seem to exist somewhere outside reality. Alone. Spotlighted. Suspended in an imaginary world.

And perhaps that is what draws me in.

The feeling that there is something just beneath the surface.

Something I can see.

Something you might not.

Shadko studied at the Glebov Art College in Minsk and the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland.