THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: A COLLABORATION ON THE ART AND INNER WORLD OF PAVEL KIRYUKHANTSEV
When you read Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, a strange, haunting thought occurs: out of a thousand educated people today, perhaps not even one could write with such clarity, depth, and human insight. How is this possible? Seneca lived and died two millennia ago. What have the eighty generations since added to our understanding of the human soul that he hadn’t already glimpsed and articulated?
Pavel often returns to this question — not just with Seneca, but with the authors of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, and others. The unsettling feeling is always the same: the ancients saw with terrifying lucidity. They remain alive in his mind, while many of today’s voices ring hollow.
In art, literature, cinema, and science, Pavel has always engaged in dialogue with those who came before him. Some are still alive — like Nassim Taleb, Viktor Pelevin, Paolo Sorrentino, Boris Grebenshchikov — but many more are gone: Francis Bacon, Sergei Parajanov, René Magritte, Aubrey Beardsley, Warhol, Basquiat, Rodchenko, Klutsis, Chubarov, Miró, Klein…
Yet the real divide, he believes, is not between the living and the dead. It is between those who are truly alive — and those who have long been dead on the inside. These “Living Dead” are everywhere. They consume beauty like fast food, avoid mental and emotional effort, and kill their inner child before it’s even born. Worse, they wage war on the living: they dilute, standardize, sterilize, ridicule. They dismantle anything that dares to stay wild, strange, or luminous.
Many artists, thinkers, and scientists — whose task it was to bring light, knowledge, and love — have succumbed to this zombified world of mediocrity. Fear of freedom is deeply human. Even the freest societies have little tolerance for the wild soul.
But then, there are those rare few who resist. Who stay true. Who reject the programmed life. Who preserve the child inside. Who love — even those who have forgotten how to love.
Pavel’s art emerges from a deep reverence for those who remained themselves despite the cost. Malevich, for instance, is far closer to him than Dalí. Dalí was a good painter, yes, but not a true one. Malevich was a true artist. Pavel is fascinated not just by talent, but by longevity — by those who stayed artists till the very end. Like Leni Riefenstahl, who at 71 took up deep-sea diving and underwater photography. Or Marc Chagall, who spent a lifetime chasing his lovers through the sky.
His relationship with Time — and with those who defy it — is at the heart of his creative quest. That’s why conversations with artists about Time are so central to his work. Sometimes it’s not just one voice speaking through him, but several — as in his piece Letter from Klimt to Beardsley, or The Night of Kuindzhi and Magritte, where the two artists seem to converse inside him. Or laugh, depending on the day.
He zooms in on familiar images with new eyes, like in his take on Munch’s Scream. Is he zooming in on the painting or on Munch himself? Even he’s not sure.
His series inspired by Victor Vasarely is distant from Vasarely’s precise language — but the Hungarian master dances inside Pavel all the same. Yves Tanguy’s ovoid forms sneak in too. And thank God they do. They don’t interrupt; they participate.
Soprano: Marija Jelic
Pavel’s inner dialogues are often contradictory. He dislikes illustration, shuns decoration — and yet, where does all that Klimt-like gold come from? All those sinuous Secessionist motifs? Francis Bacon speaks to him more as a thinker than a painter — and yet, there he is again, in the spectral presences of Pope Innocent X, haunting his darker works with the same tortured energy that Bacon unleashed in his own infamous portrait.
To Pavel, this ongoing conversation with the greats is not just intellectual or visual. It is existential. He began sharing his creations with the world relatively late. But in doing so, he is also telling the story of those who helped him see. Who helped him live.
