Having studied architecture at leading universities in Milan and London, Illya began his career in the field, where he spent several years shaping structures, forms, and compositions into architectural projects and interior designs. Yet painting always remained the basis, offering a sense of immediacy, emotional depth, and creative freedom that architecture could never fully provide. Today, based in Spain, he continues to create and exhibit his work internationally.

Deeply influenced by the legends and visual poetry of the American West, Illya constructs atmospheric worlds suspended somewhere between memory, cinema, and lived experience, emerging through expressive brushwork and layered, earth-toned palettes, evoking landscapes shaped by wind, silence, and distance.

Rather than documenting the West in a literal sense, his paintings explore its emotional resonance, reflecting freedom and isolation, movement and stillness, nostalgia and resilience. Dramatic light and unconventional perspectives lend the works a cinematic intensity, as though capturing a fleeting moment just before it disappears.

There is a quiet tension running through Illya’s practice: a dialogue between raw instinct and careful composition, between the monumental and the intimate. His works do not simply depict landscapes or figures; they translate visuals into emotion, interpreting his personal experience – atmospheric, raw, and deeply human.