In the installations by Y. Fesenko a foolish conceptualism is presented in the form of an amusing coarseness of gilded tin soldiers.  Another example - the Ukrainian-baroque allegories by M.Mazenko, where, in full accordance with the Kiev-Odessa tradition, the rich allegorical designs are gathered into garlands. Our Cossack could teach even Leo Tolstoy how to properly depict War and Peace, or what the world market is, where one can find a turnip, a gun, crops, and other goods and chattels. Here peaceful pitchfork, combined with grenades, cartridges and other ammunition, turn into a weapon to be used for a glorious resistance to the Fritz, Muscovites and other adversaries. The artist’s cunning amiability helps one to look at such freestyle exercises of dashing talent without much of a moral indignation. 

The author of War and Peace was mentioned here for a reason.  R. Vashekevich remembered our classic, copied a bearded face of some provincial Father Frost, and decorated this individual with a medical plaster and black stickers. There are still some literate people between Minsk and Vladivostok, and they vaguely recall that Leo Tolstoy wrote a big book about the great and terrible war of the long-ago, and they still remember that he was bearded and unusual. The memory goes, and this is even for better, because along with the memory go passion and prejudice, hatred and bitterness, a thirst for revenge and other demons. 

Thank God that the artists of this exhibition do not shake and squirm with a patriotic pathos and with uniform-bursting testosterone. Military paraphernalia, as a pretext for his beautiful ironic design-fantasies, is dear to D. Tsvetkov. I remember when in my distant childhood I used to look with pleasure at the dress-coat and the cap of my father, who during the war had earned a big iconostasis of orders. I must thank Tsvetkov, for he made me remember my child’s delight in looking at the golden epaulettes, edges, buttons and trimmings, and in looking at hefty orders, which to a young fool (i.e. me) seemed to be huge and beautiful.  What an excellent white and colourful cloth was used by the generous artist-tailor for making coats of unknown marshals and generals! So many beads and so many precious gold threads were used for making their orders, with each of them being as large as a saucer!  These exercises on the subject of uniform chic and formidable symbols are no longer dangerous. They have become peaceful, homey, and even charming - to the same extent as an ineradicable foolishness can be charming too.

There are sophisticated and official pacifists, but there are also pacifists that look like unsophisticated bumpkins. The Blue Noses have once again become notable for their directness and virility.  They presented their some kind of a “dream demob”: a well-fed and chubby middle-aged man in his camouflage uniform, reclining on a simple but comfortable couch, surrounded by various bottles and snacks. “Peace is better than war, just as freedom is better that unfreedom” - Siberia, free and creative, said through its hiccups. But let’s note that the paunchy hero of a tavern front doesn’t hurry to take his uniform beret and his camouflage pants off. He is still going to fight, but it won’t be a scary war, and even if one single woman screams, then the sound will soon turn into a sign of consent and pleasure.

At the exhibition we won’t see the victorious heroes, and we won’t see the terrible and dangerous enemies of mankind. They are turning into the shadows of half-forgotten ancestors, and all that is left to do is to apply the psychotechnique of recalling about the not-experienced. Weapons of war, by contrast, appear in shot every now and then. But these are not the glorious weapons of salvation, and not the instruments of heinous violence. More often we see the “toy-cannons”, entertaining attractions on the theme of military equipment. Even seemingly serious objects by A. Ponomarev, his submarines and torpedoes, rather belong to the category of “life-size models” and other entertainment for young people. If surfacing in the waters of fabulous Venice, near the Kremlin in the Moscow River, or even appearing in the famous pool at the entrance to the Louvre, the submarine fleet by Ponomareva won’t scare anybody, and the psychedelic paintings on the hulls do not improve the camouflage, but rather provide a sight for sore eyes. There isn’t a smell of murder. Or the smell faded. It smells of anaesthesia, narcosis - or even a sort of a narcotic consciousness expansion.