Mikhail Volkov. "The Great Russian Myth"

Russian folk surrealism in the Artmuza museum: artist Mikhail Volkov is preparing a personal exhibition The Great Russian Myth.

Mikhail Volkov is a surrealist, inclined to the pressure of text in his works: as the author himself claims, his paintings are poems written in a different way. It seems that the artist, on an intuitive level, adopted from the forefathers of the genre a specific flavor and images of the desert completely unusual for our cultural code - then, in order to stir in them Orthodox allusions, confidently adjacent to official militarism and that inexplicable set of features that make up a poetic metaphor for the Russian field of experiments itself.

Mikhail Volkov speaks with the viewer in the language of poetic images, and even with a certain effort, one cannot stop tracking down specific plots, roots, nourished either from the semantic space of Yegor Letov's poetry, or from the world of linguistic experiments by Pyotr Mamonov. The images are witty and bring the paintings to a slightly different plane, where the dream sur is giving way to a special national way of life, everyday, “domestic” situations are traced in dreams, understandable to everyone at the level of intuition (the artist cannot refuse this) and transforming everything that happens into simultaneously ironic, a foolish and concentratedly serious performance. This makes us say with confidence: a truly Russian folk surrealism appears before the viewer, in all the paradox of its definition.

Among the spheres with which the artist plays, everything is key - history, the world around him, personal path, destiny, the dichotomy of good and evil, soul, faith, society. But the very outcome of the thought process, puzzled by the goal of understanding what the “Great Russian myth” is, the author, as usual in such genres, leaves out of brackets.