Bearing the declaratively uncompromising, angry title NOFUCKINFUNNY, Nikolay Oleynikov’s new show opens the season at the Paperworks Gallery. The ten gouaches and one album on display here are models of traditional, even somewhat naïve, easel art; on the other hand, they are quasi-comics whose content is one part radical politics, one part existential philosophy.

Pen and brush stroke, just like the impressive dimensions of the pieces (from 1.5 x 1.2 meters to 1.5 x 2 meters), do not operate here as attributes of “mastery” in the classical, religious sense of the word. Neither are they effects of “technique,” which in contemporary art compensates and forestalls the absence of “mastery.” Mastery, as sacred title, and technique, as its capitalized, fetishistic substitute, retreat before the texture and facticity of the artist’s labor. The word labor, which had almost been consigned to oblivion, acquires new life and recuperates its purloined honor. Oleynikov as it were solicitously dusts off Soviet agit-posters, thus reminding us of the proletarian element in art. And, although there is painterliness and polish in his images, there is also something in them that is profoundly unpleasant to bourgeois taste.

Ссылка на оригинал: http://www.flickr.com/photos/36989889@N05/sets/72157624169831283/show/