Pavel Otdelnov's first solo show in the UK unfolds over three floors, paintings on each level forming a chapter in a larger narrative around the Soviet past and its uses and abuses in contemporary Russia. The show opens with two works showing red carpets and so echoing the carpeted staircase of Pushkin House, its Bloomsbury venue. In one, above the stairs leading to the lower ground floor, we see a carpet running along a narrow corridor in a Moscow bunker that was once a secret, bomb-proof communications centre and is now the Cold War Museum (Bunker, 2022). So the show concerns itself from the outset with the afterlife of the Soviet Union, the symbolism of power and the shadow of armed conflict.

It kicks off in earnest on the lower ground floor, Pushkin's own bunker, as it were, where Otdelnov has installed a series of images that touch on the Soviet Union's nuclear stockpile. Here are two missile silos, painted in the artist's trademark style, lifelike and plain (Missile Silo 1 and 2, 2022). Near them is a much larger canvas showing another silo, this one filled with banknotes, the work looking back to the moment in 1991 when old notes were taken out of circulation and bank accounts frozen in a bid to stabilise the rouble and inhibit black market trading (Money, 2022). While many saw their life savings wiped out, the state was left with vast quantities of worthless notes that could not be burned on account of the lead they contained. So they were stored in missile silos that were lying empty following the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Here the military installation, a sign of Soviet might, is drawn into association with the dislocations that attended the fall of the Soviet empire in an image that knowingly combines sublime effects, in the crushing scale of the military construction, with absurdist overtones.

The show continues on the ground floor with paintings suggesting absence and loss. A rail carriage stands in a field of snow, the painting referring through its title, Cargo 200, 2022, to the refrigerated rail cars that brought the bodies of fallen soldiers back from Afghanistan in the years that followed the Soviet invasion of 1979. Another work in the same room features four seats rendered in glowing red and orange tones as if they were made of a heat-sensitive material and still carried the imprints of recently departed bodies (Seats, 2022).  Seemingly quiet and dispassionate, 

these images draw grim parallels between past and present military adventures.

Upstairs, in the final space, Otdelnov reflects again on the Soviet regime, more directly addressing the nostalgia that it provokes in some Russian circles today. Two large paintings square off here. In one, a number of elderly women form a parade, holding up placards bearing Soviet-era slogans such as 'The USSR is the guarantor of peace' and 'Our labour is for you, Motherland' (Parade, 2022). On the other, a patterned wall modelled on a 1974 design by Boris Lachman runs parallel to the picture plane, blocking off the background (The Wall, 2022). Lachman's 'checkered fence' is a reminder of Soviet times ubiquitous in the post-Soviet world. Here, it acts as a sign of entrapment and a bleak rejoinder to the slogans brandished opposite. It can be read as hinting at the confining power of propaganda. In these as in other paintings in the show, the central motifs appear against broad, flat, snow-covered but otherwise featureless landscapes that give the lie to expressions of optimism like those readable on the placards.

Some visitors to the show will recognise the tune coming from the self-playing piano positioned between these two large canvases as the theme song of the Soviet-era television series 'Guest from the Future'. As another upbeat touch laced with irony, the tune served as the soundtrack to an inspiring vision of the future but now works only in a nostalgic register.

Why the wariness about the Soviet past? Otdelnov is plainly intrigued by, at times drawn to, elements of Soviet culture. He has a fondness for Soviet design and TV, possibly also for his elderly demonstrators.
But he is alert to the weaponisation of nostalgia by a regime that sees the dissolution of the Soviet empire as a humiliating travesty and that draws much of its support from generations that still remember Soviet times, that is to say, from pensioners such as those in the artist's parade. Otdelnov views the historical trajectory of his country with an eye for paradoxical recurrences and for the self-serving revisionism of the current political elite. But the absurdism in his work is understated, as it has to be to avoid the shrillness of propaganda, old and new. This is a tightly organised show with a dark and complex narrative that is no less powerful for being expressed in muted terms.

Marcus Verhagen is an art historian and critic

Virtually all critics and researchers agree that Pavel Otdelnov is the main painter of our time, even if his major artistic statements were made as total installations where painting plays an equal role to texts, documents, and the space itself. There can be no doubt that Otdelnov’s Ringing Trace, which showcases the history of the Soviet nuclear industry in the Southern Urals, has become one of the best and most significant in all of Russia in 2021. The Iskusstvo Magazine has already covered this project in detail, but a dedicated issue on painting cannot but revisit it and ask the author why painting needs to be included in the project and why it is so important, while potentially appearing quite superfluous in comparison with text.

Pavel Otdelnov, artist:

When people speak of painting as a medium and an individual artwork (and I make this distinction deliberately), they often overlook a number of aspects that I see as crucial. First, there is the temporal component. Painting seems to be a fixed and static medium. Yet, an individual painting would contain time within it: in the paint drips, the translucent glazing, and the interfaces between colours. This is the time of an artist who had been creating this object. In a finished piece, it exists in a condensed state, but an apt viewer would always recognize this component. A painting thus acts as an objectification of time.

He points to a politically engaged art tradition in Russia, from the 19th century ‘Peredvizhniki’, who staged mobile exhibitions “for the people” outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, to the revolutionary art of 20th-century Avant-Garde. But he claims he is not worried about repercussions, because his aesthetic treats the personal experience of ordinary Russians with a sense of distance, thereby removing it from everyday politics. It’s a balance between detachment and personal involvement which he seeks in all his work.“I look at what is going on as a person on the inside and as if I am also at one remove… as if it was another civilisation, not the one I am part of,” Otdelnov explains. “To me, it’s important to have that viewpoint. Art makes this perspective possible.”
Art critic Ari Akkermans says the work on show at the Moscow Biennale marks him as “one of the emerging voices in contemporary Russian art”. He argues that Otdelnov’s brand of “melancholy realism” is right on trend, as global contemporary art rediscovers figurative painting. “Otdelnov represents a kind of renewal of figurative painting… something unseen in Eastern Europe for a long time, where it’s usually conceptual/abstract art that leads, followed by a kind of ironic realism… His paintings are not just historical scenes but have a very emotional connection. It’s a personal story,” Akkerman argues.
Earlier this year, in a solo show with the title “Promzona” at Moscow’s Museum of Modern Art, Otdelnov dug deep into his own personal history and that of the city where he grew up. Born into a Soviet-era ‘labour dynasty’, Otdelnov drew on stories of his family, three generations of engineers who worked at highly polluted chemical factories of Dzerzhinsk, to examine what he described as “the ruins of a Soviet mythology”.
In ‘Promzona’ (which translates as “Industrial Zone”), Otdelnov’s huge, photographically precise canvases showed the now abandoned factories where his family once worked, interspersed with everyday objects and stories of their lives. His exploration of Russia’s Soviet industrial past shows how its mythology failed to translate into reality for ordinary people working in often dangerous and toxic environments. And yet growing up in Dzerzhinsk, Otdelnov says he felt it was an optimistic place. Born in 1979, just over a decade before the Soviet Union collapsed, he traces his first exposure to art to his father, who would often illustrate explanations of how science worked. “He would tell me stories and draw them. He showed me how to put out a fire; he made drawings of how big machines worked,” Otdelnov recalls. He remembers, too, how his grandfather tried to direct Otdelnov’s early artistic career. He disapproved of young Pavel’s dark comic book illustrations and would buy him brightly decorated colouring books. Pavel didn’t take the bait and simply coloured the drawings in black. “He was fighting against the blackness, he wanted my drawing to be more optimistic, but it didn’t work,” says Otdelnov, remembering how offended he was when his grandfather found another use for his dark drawings. Those were the days when toilet tissue was in short supply in Soviet households, Otdelnov chuckles.
Today he says he is ready to leave the ruins of Russia’s Soviet past behind, to look further at the “present-day ruins” of landfill sites being constructed every day at huge speeds. It’s history in the making, on a human scale. The story of our civilisation will be told by archaeologists of the future, sifting through these sites to piece together a picture of people’s lives through the garbage they threw away, Otdelnov explains. “It’s a way of looking at history so you can touch it… offering not the big narrative, or big historical concepts, but reflecting history through your own reality.

Kate de Pury, "Pavel Otdelnov: Future Ruins", "Russian Art Focus" #14, January 2020

The more it is developed, the narrower the spot, which seems to be a reality for us. This psychological mechanism works when we don’t notice daily occurrences, which is not in congruence with our likes as our unseeing glance glides typical depressing environment of the town outskirts. Our aesthetic feeling is formed by existing discourses — such optics always fall behind. It is impossible to catch the image of the present with the help of yesterday’s cognitive instruments. Present finds out to be practically invisible. That’s why Pavel changes the optics and tries to observe the present from the future: to imagine what a person would see in our deserted industrial landscapes, who has different cultural prisms, enabling him to have a different look at non-sites: interested, accepting, forgiving, sweet, seeing fragility and temporariness of today’s urban monsters. As the artist says, they can fall apart into pixels and vanish.

Svetlana Polyakova, "Non-Sites in Art and Posthuman World", "Dialogue of Arts", #4. 2017