ONTOLONE
Artist’s statement
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Sometimes I’m an artist. Sometimes I’m a fraud. But I keep creating anyway. This process doesn’t just reflect who I am, it helps me stay present.
I think about existence while laughing at absurdity. I make things I don’t always understand. I borrow from philosophy, Soviet lo-fi, intuition, broken cameras and half-formed dreams. I want to show beauty where there is none, and invite people to reflect, and maybe even smile.
I don’t create the art, I make something that may or may not be considered as art by someone else. Because art, just as all other linguistic classifications, is highly subjective and individual. My work is a continuous inquiry into what it means to live, to exist, and to be.
I navigate philosophical questions through a lens of humour, introspection, and a breaking of the fourth wall; I engage with themes of identity, language, perception, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture.
My practice is experimental and often spontaneous. I create in cycles by layering, reworking, and reinterpreting as I go, embracing unpredictability as an integral part of the process. As a self-taught outsider artist, I work across media: painting, collage, analogue photography, video.
My art is not just expression, it is reaction. A need to document the intangible, to freeze fleeting ideas, and to explore the tension between self and society, image and thought, time and meaning.
Ontolone is the artistic project of London-based multimedia artist Ilya Melnikov, whose work spans experimental film, analog photography, lo-fi sound, collage, painting, and written text. Active since 2010, Ilya draws on postmodernist theory, metaphysics, and aesthetic philosophy to create multimedia pieces that are raw, fractured, and intellectually driven. Working at the intersection of conceptualism, outsider art, and philosophical inquiry, his practice explores subjectivity, phenomenological reduction, moral perspective, and the unstable boundaries between image, media, and meaning. Ontolone’s work resists polish and embraces the imperfect — functioning as a living archive of form, intuition, and existential doubt.
Ilya holds both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Film and Screen Studies, with academic research focused on Nietzsche, Kubrick, and the intersection of visual gesture and tragedy. His work is deeply influenced by Heidegger, Wittgenstein, the Russian avant-garde, outsider art, surrealism, and underground music. He maintains an independent studio practice and publishes work via Instagram and private screenings, with an ongoing focus on film, sound, visual series, and experimental prose. Future directions include publishing, collaboration, and small-scale exhibitions — but at its core, Ontolone remains a self-contained process of questioning, dismantling, and reassembling art through a philosophical and lo-fi lens.
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