MUZALEVSKY

Sergey Khachaturov is an esteemed art critic, theorist, curator, and art historian with a significant contribution to the field of Russian art studies. He holds a candidate degree in art history and serves as an associate professor at the Department of the History of Russian Art at the Historical Faculty of Moscow State University (MSU). Additionally, Khachaturov is a lecturer at the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia named after Alexander Rodchenko.

The unofficial art of the post-war USSR is rich with various systems and styles. Today, these are often combined with global trends in modernist and postmodernist art, which Soviet artists only intuitively sensed. It turns out that Eli Belutin is close to Dubuffet and Art Brut, while Mikhail Chernishov aligns with American Minimalism and Pop Art. It seems each artist can be categorized and labeled... However, this generation of unofficial masters includes such geniuses that challenge systematic cataloging. Their art appears to parody the sanctity of doctrinaire rigidity. They act out, obscure trails, and stage a carnival of masks.

The foremost such genius—an artist of mischief—is Moscow-based Lev Povzner. In the 1960s, he studied at the training ground of Moscow conceptualism—the Polygraphic Institute (colloquially known as "Polygraph"). There was far more freedom here than in Soviet academies. In the mid-60s, Povzner joined the realm of unofficial art. In 1967, a triad of artists—Lev Povzner, Mikhail Roginsky, and Evgeny Izmailov—formed the "Union of Three," which lasted until the late 1970s. Povzner actively exhibited in apartment shows and participated in the famous nonconformist exhibition of 1975 at the VDNH House of Culture.

The artist adheres to his method of working in series and creating compositions based on the principle of anamorphosis, which involves hiding images and confusing trails. Profiles are encrypted in snowy landscapes, and a kitten transforms into a pupil of an eye. Optical displacement promises pleasure akin to the magical images of childhood.

For Povzner, anamorphosis is not merely a playful trompe l’oeil technique. In the perspective of art history, it is a crucial method for dissecting and assembling various presentation systems, their ironic deconstruction, and living in new contexts. Lev Povzner keenly understands the essence of collage postmodernism with its play of quotations and total irony toward the grand dictatorship of great meanings. However, in my opinion, his postmodernism becomes a powerful means of finding one's own position of non-arrival, estrangement, and freedom of interpretation across different systems. In his series with encrypted faces, Povzner transcends the situation of being trapped by various "isms" and overly conventional, formatted systems of interpretation and evaluation. In the script of dispersal, he finds freedom.

The large works created with acrylic on oilcloth and oil on canvas in the late 1990s are a magnificent example of what literary critics call the "unreliable narrator." Villages, barracks, landscapes, and profiles of people form compositions with the artist’s beloved "hidden faces." Initially, one might think the message is very personal and intimate, akin to naive outsider painting. It seems to be a saga of wounded memory, life in the zone of condemned relatives, and Stalin’s mustaches that seem to bristle in a female figure dressed in a coat with a fur collar.

However, these deceptions do not hide a personal story. They are after-images of our collective memory, and the collage here is constructed from some leitmotifs that are archetypal, like lines from Soviet songs. I believe that a very subtle commentary on the "hidden faces" and after-images of memory in Povzner’s paintings is provided by his magnificent poems, for example, the following one titled "Word":

Here’s the Pale Martyr in a blazing shirt,

Walking down Komsomolsky Lane, so alert.

And snow is falling on Komsomolsky Lane;

He walks in the snow, in his blazing shirt, so plain.

Everyone sees him, but no one recalls,

And calmly they glide, through the streets and the halls:

They cross the road, turn to the right,

All people of quiet, forest-like might.

An axe at his waist, glasses with frames tight.

The virtuosity of these poems impacts as fiercely and sincerely as the paintings of Art Brut masters and Lev Povzner’s own art.

Many of Lev Povzner's series literally buzz with quotes and parodies of various masters, from the great past to the Soviet-era poster artists. Looking at these series created in the 2000s and 2010s, there is never a sense of "an old joke." They are masterful in execution and universal in meaning. Avoiding flat journalistic commentary, in my opinion, is achieved through the principle of double encryption. In the series "Shpiegel," "Caprices," and "Grass," there are not only optical twins and anamorphoses but also the genre of "painting within a painting."

This genre of "painting within a painting" translates the artist's captured anecdote into an exquisite burimé, a journey through art history. The pleasure that the viewer receives is of a completely different nature than that of a caricature in a newspaper. For example, in the 2000s painting "The Dance of the Commissar," a dancing absurd figure transforms into a sharply-nosed profile of a woman with an unkind gaze. This is the first mechanical level of encryption of mysteries. The second is purely intellectual pleasure, allowing one to see hidden allusions in the composition with the dancing commissar, staging the grand painting of the past. It is appropriate to mention the pre-Raphaelite painting by William Hunt, "The Awakening Conscience," with the courtesan and the repentant sinner. However, a more evident hidden presence is the archetypal for us exquisitely painted work by Pavel Fedotov, "The Fresh Cavalier." The mad little man of the great empire is surrounded by traces of a long-lasting drinking spree.

The grand history of art helps Lev Povzner to construct his anamorphoses and stage his non-arrival in remarkably beautiful ways. The double staging in paintings with flowers refers both to Arcimboldo with his portraits of nobles assembled from elements of nature and to Lewis Carroll’s fairy tales, truly discovered by unofficial circle artists. Faces emerging in the dreary gray landscapes of urban outskirts certainly set up a dialogue with the Lianozovo group, Rabin, and Kropivnitsky. In a composition with such piercing Soviet melancholy, Dutch witches and even Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s "Mad Greta" might intrude. Witches live in the hair of the female portrait.

This method of double encryption using the "unreliable narrator" invites the viewer to intensely empathize with new mysteries and eagerly creatively unravel them. The naive virtuosity of Povzner’s painting style offers a chance to overcome eclecticism and even the set frames of postmodernist ironic collage-pastiche. The careful beauty of each composition hides something very confiding, even heartfelt. One can draw parallels with the new generation of Zoomer artists who emerged from the grassroots of the visual arts—graffiti artists and tattooists. Today, in a virtuously naive manner, he creates his worlds in which meta-irony, memes, and stencils are transformed into new visual poetry, deep and honest.