This painting was part of a generous donation to the Mendocino Art Center by Janet and David Peoples in 2023.

Russian man in white tuicto left of small table and 2 girls viewing and artwork surrounded by birds.

Pavel Leonov (1920-2011) called himself “the designer” of the world. Persecuted by society and laughed at by his fellow villagers, Leonov was a holy fool. An innate sense of justice and an inquiring mind ensured him many years spent in and out of labor camps throughout the former Soviet Union, until his final release in 1955 after Stalin’s death.

Leonov structured a painting not as a single visual space, but as a hierarchy of horizontal and vertical segments associated with different spaces. These spaces are like windows, which Leonov called “television sets.” The narration occurs on several semantic planes, functioning on parallel levels and each carrying their own messages.

Leonov often depicted stories from his memories, but their implementation and his representation of historic and religious events were irrational and illogical. Leonov’s constructions of the world represent a personal language of symbols and signs, resembling the Egyptian system of hieroglyphics, which implies infinite the division and expansion of space, life, and experience. In his view, other realities exist in tandem with our own, and by projecting we can reach them. Using rough textiles and large sizes, his paintings resemble tapestries, in which the artist created powerful images of universal value.