VLADEY and OVCHARENKO present the solo exhibition by Krasil Makar «From afar, long».
Krasil Makar is the public persona of an artist who began his career in 2017. According to the legend he created himself, he was born in the village of Nizhnyaya Sinyachikha (now in the Sverdlovsk Region) in 1889 — a year later than Giorgio de Chirico, a year earlier than El Lissitzky. As the researcher and art historian Irina Kudryavtseva rightly notes, Krasil Makar’s early emergence eliminates the question of continuity, quotation, or imitation. He is a self‑proclaimed contemporary of absolutely everything in the artistic process over the past nearly century and a half: he is connected to pre‑revolutionary folk crafts, to the Russian avant‑garde, to the post‑war international style of high modernism, to contemporary art that emerged in the second half of the 20th century, and to the post‑digital, object‑based art that succeeded it in the current century. The programmatic anonymity of Krasil Makar also contributes to this organic affinity with everything listed above: the works are directly present at exhibitions and in public spaces, but the author seems to be absent — his figure is dissolved in the air, hidden behind vague formulations of a fake official biography. And yet, even in such circumstances, with a minimum of initial data and a maximum of questions generated by them, we can say with confidence that, amidst the diversity of motifs and eras, Krasil Makar has defined rather clear aesthetic dominants for himself. This is the avant‑garde and modernism.
Although these phenomena are noticeably different, they are still close — in many respects, they overlap and creep into one another. The artist is drawn to the area where the avant‑garde, with its extremely militant spirit and sharp, often contradictory impulses, meets high modernism, which by the middle of the last century had become the dominant style — all‑pervasive, yet at the same time bourgeoisly average, too calm and herbivorous. This imaginary moment of one thing transitioning into another — which, as a clear, concentrated event, never actually occurred in history — is what Krasil Makar constructs after the fact. It’s hard to imagine Kazimir Malevich or the Futurists in their prime era shaking hands with Mark Rothko and Henry Moore, who were also captured during the peak of their fame — and yet, both of them surprisingly coexist peacefully. Not their specific styles, but generalized casts of cultural eras that are marked by these names and groupings: the uncompromising life‑building of the avant‑garde and the late‑modernist fatigue with the sharp turns in the field of culture.
That is why Krasil Makar’s plastic solutions seem extremely simple, literally streamlined, at first glance neutral, and, at the same time, extremely effective from an agitational standpoint, although it is absolutely unclear what exactly they are agitating for — most likely, for the works themselves. After seeing the artist’s works once, it will be difficult, practically impossible, to get them out of your head. In this sense, it’s no coincidence that Krasil Makar frequently works in the field of public art. Having absorbed the experience of various artistic experiments — strategies ranging from Soviet monumental propaganda to modernist park sculpture and the subtle conceptualist incorporation into the texture of large‑scale forms — he plays all these cards in parallel. The interplay of patterns and volumes in the spirit—though not in the letter—of Niki de Saint‑Phalle, plus the colour scheme of a peasant toy, and on top of it, and “between the lines,” also a visual commentary in the style of our native unofficial art. It is characteristic that the public art objects created by Krasil Makar, such as “Portal” (2022) in Yekaterinburg, easily withstand vandalism—they simply appropriate it, assimilate it, and add it to the multitude of layers that are already present in the work.
In today’s atmosphere, when, on the one hand, we’re barely coping with the flood of news and memes, and on the other hand, it seems like nothing much is really happening, the objects created by Krasil Makar seem perfectly synonymous with the moment. Colorful and eye‑catching, yet delicate and free of sharp edges, they are an integral part of contemporary cultural realities: people want intense passions, but only from a distance; there seems to be a hum of loud shouts, but each individual participant in this chorus paradoxically remains more silent than vocal; there is a widespread feeling that everything has already been done, that everything is repeating itself. The world is tired of complexity, but original simplicity is unattainable, and therefore even multi‑layered works are sparing in images and plastic tricks. And Krasil Makar offers one of the best ways to act in these new conditions.
