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, the space itself. There can be no doubt that Otdelnov’s Ringing Trace, which showcases the history of 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.

Otdelnov says this step into “social consciousness” was important for his development as an artist.
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 the 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 is the spot, which seems to be a reality for us. This psychological mechanism works when we don’t notice daily occurrence, which is not in congruence with our likes as our unseeing glance glide typical depressing environment of the town outskirts. Our aesthetic feeling is formed by existing discourses — such optics always falls behind. It is impossible to catch the image of 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 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