Pavel Otdelnov’s Inner Degunino is a project, prepared specially for the youth program of Moscow Museum of Modern Art.Exhibitions of the program have been hosted by the MMOMA since 2006. Over the years, works by many interesting artists, using different techniques, have been exhibited. We presented artists, engaged in photography, video, object and installation art, painting and media performance. In recent years, there has been a tendency of return of painting in the context of the latest trends of contemporary art. More and more interesting young artists turn to painting as a medium, which has a great visual potential and a rich cultural background. The Internal Degunino project is a good example of the artist’s use of the language of painting to solve his artistic and conceptual tasks. The project arouses a painful feeling of vast empty spaces of the city suburbs. As if someone creates a 1:1 scale-model of the city, collecting some elements of standard parts, but it is not still ready. The flat landscape covered with the grey urban snow together with residential areas creates the illusion of abandonment of alien objects, which serve as a shelter for the night and happiness of tens of thousands of people.

As if seen blurred vision, elements of the urban landscape transform into symbols of themselves, emerging from obscurity for a moment and disappearing again as soon as the viewer changes his gaze direction. Fixing of the ordinary was characteristic of the culture of the 2nd half of the 20th century. In the 1950s, praising objects, produced by mass culture, the Pop art introduced the profane in the language of art. In the late 1960s, the Hyperrealism captured the ordinary in great detail, and Gerhard Richter painted his “blurry photos”. The ordinary, familiar, banal became a legitimate part of the contemporary visual culture. The characters of Pavel Otdelnov’s paintings are subway passengers or P44 series panel buildings, or bright shopping centers. The artist seems to recreate the period of stagnation in the life of an urban inhabitant, the moment of his travels over the conventional West Degunino district, when surrounding real objects are scenery for teleportation to a tiny cell of the life with a sofa, dinner and a TV rather than a part of the life. Every day millions of people pass this way, followed by power lines, and erase it from their life, treating it as a period of meaningless solitude.

Daria Kamyshnikova