Comrades on the Market, seventh phase, pastel micro series

A controlled first public presentation of an ongoing painting project

Comrades on the Market / Elvtársak a Piacon is a multi phase, continuously expanding painting project that examines questions of identity at the intersections of post communist visual culture, online self representation and social marginality. The series is based on amateur portrait photographs circulating on Russian dating platforms and social media, images that often become objects of mockery, irony or memetic distortion in online public space, while originally carrying intentions of intimacy and the desire for connection.

The project does not aim to produce individual psychological portraits, it investigates types, roles and figurative prototypes, the depicted figures function as variants within broader social and visual patterns rather than as closed characters. The designation Prototype refers to the figure rather than to the image, faces and bodies become simultaneously visible and interchangeable within the digital sphere, their identities appear unstable, vulnerable and temporary.

The five pastel works presented here constitute the seventh phase of the project, forming a self contained micro series defined by a distinct technical and material approach. Executed in soft pastel on mounted, rustic paper surfaces, the fragility and porosity of the support establish a direct parallel with the uncertainty and exposure of the depicted identities. The painterly gesture is expressive, grotesque, lyrical and banal qualities converge, the images do not construct narrative scenes, they register states, moments that are intimate and uncomfortably public at the same time.

These works operate as painterly translations rather than illustrations or caricatures, they transfer figures from isolated, exposed or overstated roles within the online environment into a slower and more sensitive visual register. Humor does not dissolve tension, it coexists with loneliness, desire, aggression and the need for connection, the images move beyond irony and articulate an empathetic and critical perspective on the absurd and tragicomic experience of post communist existence.

Although the project began chronologically with earlier watercolor and drawing series, the seventh phase does not function as an intermediate chapter, it operates as a point of condensation and synthesis, where color, painterly language and the prototype logic appear in a clarified form, anticipating the direction of subsequent large scale oil and acrylic paintings.

This online presentation constitutes the first consciously controlled public appearance of the series. The works are legible as autonomous images, while remaining embedded within a longer term, exhibition oriented process, in which painting, language, symbols and social roles are layered and interwoven.