Falling under the map: Sasha Yazov’s airbrush art of The Sims turns pixels to paint

The contemporary airbrush scene is quite fascinating. In the 70s, James Rosenquist’s Marilyn would use stencils and collage aesthetics in a fine art setting, whereas H.R Giger would become a household name through his nightmarish metalscapes, realised through the tool’s potential for realistic textures and burnished gradients. It’s what makes us nostalgic for old-school advertising, if it’s for cigarettes or the iconic movie posters of Drew Struzan. Somewhere along the way, one can notice that this little process of blowing paint onto a page lends itself particularly well for the cartoonish, the fantastical, the unreal – in fact, Georgia-based artist Sasha Yazov was one of the first of the new wave of airbrush painters to approach the unique world of video game aesthetics with the often overlooked practice.

Like many artists, Sasha was obsessed with video games as a kid, drawing scenes and characters from games and cartoons from memory, even in kindergarten. Later on as a teenager, Sasha became enamoured with the styles of Rūté Merk and Alex Colville, the latter of which long predates the aesthetic of low polygon characters and the low-res fuzziness of early 3D video games. “Back then, not many people were using airbrush the way it’s used now in contemporary painting and at some point I realised it was the perfect tool for rendering digital artefacts on a canvas,” says Sasha. Artefacts is a great word for it, because Sasha’s paintings feel like explorations into the long-gone, dead servers of our childhood gaming worlds – these games’ aesthetics are a driving factor in our cultural nostalgia for 2000s computer games. Compared to the vibrant and massively popular worlds of today’s Fortnite, where hundreds of moving images can co-exist at once on-screen, games like The Sims, Morrowind or miscellaneous life simulators feel strangely barren, haunted even.

Fascinatingly, Sasha is all about magnifying the traces of how people exist inside virtual worlds. He spends a lot of time exploring old forgotten gaming forums where people have shared custom downloadable content, which becomes the foundation for his work. These aren’t just painted screenshots, but windows into the way people have moulded 3D environments around their fantasies. Due to his deft application of airbrush paint, Sasha is capable of capturing unique transparent elements from video games (such as microbial monsters, ominous glows, ghostly auras and cloudy glass), and with stencilling he can replicate the uncomplicated geometrics of PlayStation 2 era digital environments. It’s simultaneously detailed and alive while feeling flat, faraway and false. “It’s strange to me that people describe my work as low poly almost out of habit. I wouldn’t really call it low poly though,” says Sasha. “It’s closer to what you’d call mid poly.”

“The Sims became deeply embedded in my painting style. It’s a really great generator of randomness and also a tool for personalisation of your virtual life. In many ways I used The Sims 2, and sometimes The Sims 3, almost like a 3D editor,” says Sasha, whose perspectives and painted environments look like a video game-turned-inside-out, with glitched angles and fan-modified character models. It feels like the viewer has fallen underneath the map, seeing the world in its skeletal, forbidden form. “I think a lot of people misunderstand my intentions and assume my work is only based on nostalgia. But if you really look closely at my paintings, they rarely feature default locations from games or the most recognisable gaming imagery,” says Sasha. “What interests me is what people were searching for inside these games when they were trying to escape reality.”