The ‘Always Ready!’ series centers on decaying Communist propaganda sculptures. Once brightly painted and integrated into the visual culture of Young Pioneer camps, these figures — Lenin as a child, Young Pioneers, Komsomol members, athletes, and children — embodied ideals of discipline, health, optimism, and collective purpose. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the institutions that sustained this visual world, many remained in abandoned camps and parks, exposed to weather, damage, and gradual disappearance. Their damaged bodies recall ancient sculpture. Missing heads and limbs transform propaganda figures into archaeological fragments, while their surviving poses and contours allow the missing bodies to be reconstructed in the imagination. Even in ruin, the figures remain identifiable enough for the ideology that shaped them to remain visually legible. The memory of their intact forms completes what time has removed. Rough brushwork, a restricted palette, gold grounds, and varying degrees of pictorial completion function as temporal devices. Gold detaches some figures from their original surroundings and gives them the ambiguous stillness of icons or relics, while exposed and unresolved passages make the paintings themselves appear subject to erosion. Pictorial incompletion carries two temporal directions at once: the figures disintegrate into history as painting reconstructs them into visibility. Some images remain partially formed; others emerge with greater clarity, as though time had acted unevenly across the painted surface. With In Artek, the series turns toward the world that once animated these sculptures. Composed from Soviet press photographs, the painting reconstructs Pioneer-camp life as a scene suspended between archival record and painted memory. The children remain within an ideological world that appears active and complete. The sculptures themselves are outside the frame, yet they are easy to imagine somewhere nearby. Decades separate the present from the children in the painting, but their faces resist receding fully into history, leaving the distance between their world and ours unsettled. The series asks how an ideology disappears when its images remain legible enough to be reconstructed. The original world that produced them has vanished, yet fragments of its visual language remain available to memory, recognition, and imagination. The slogan once asserted permanent readiness: Always Ready! In these paintings, that certainty returns as a question: Ready to return?
