The standard, mass-produced plaster sculptures, found in almost every square or park, are one of the marks of the Stalinist era, the years of “developed socialism”.

Each of these monuments is a vestige of its time, commensurate to man: smaller than architecture that is a priori “superhuman” in scale, but certainly more significant than the vestiges of everyday life that dissolve over time (although the original monuments located in the capital could be up to ten metres high, later being copied throughout the country and growing in number they would at the same time become smaller, approaching their “natural size”).

Painters took this alluring motif into their arsenal long ago: even in the last decades of the Soviet period did the most sensitive among them (first and foremost Grisha Bruskin and Natalia Nesterova) appreciate the attractive and visually rich nature of this imagery, so expressively mute and idyllic. Speaking of which, one should not fail to mention Igor Mukhin’s cycle of blackand-white photographs “Soviet Monuments” (created during Perestroika) – a tough but lucid poem dedicated to disintegration, as well as the recent thorough study “Glyptocracy” by Mikhail Zolotonosov (also from Leningrad), in which the sexual connotation of mid-20th century Soviet park-sculpture is examined to a tee. However, in Plusch’s paintings there is neither the deconstruction of Sots Art, nor the postmodernist mockery of it, nor dispassionate photographism. Neither does he cite nor polemicise with anyone, finding his own metaphors and intonations that resonate not only with local and short-term concepts, but also with the entire history of Art. Plusch is interested in the playful and pubescent discourses that are also no doubt present in these sculptures, which is of no surprise – since both the imagery and his emotional perception of it “are rooted in childhood”.

There are many such statues in the Leningrad Region (one of the canvases is in fact called “Leningrad Region” – a region which, remarkably, has not been renamed to this day!). Though hard to believe, none of them was invented by the artist: all of them are real, although they are not rendered with photographic precision or documentary pedantry, but much more freely, allowing for liberties and metaphorical generalisations – after all, it is art. The main liberty is, of course, his colouring of the sculptures, having its source in the artist’s attitude towards sculpture, in the interaction of the plane with three-dimensionality, as well as in the subtle use of textures that simulate the effect of cracking. However, his colouring of the clothes and accessories here is also akin to the revival of the plaster figures, which Plusch perceives as being alive, empathising with their vulnerability, “brokenness”, with their inevitable end. Nevertheless, the spectrum of his emotions contains not only lyricism; for him such statues become vivid social vestiges, abandoned symbols of the former State (in all its manifestations) amongst the murky existential whirlpool of the present State. Their surfaces, like the bygone ideology and symbolism, can be renovated/painted over, serving as the necessary elements of the past in the decoration of the new system which, by the way, has not truly detached itself from the previous one – making them all the more tangibly concentrate around themselves the historical vacuum into which the post-Soviet space has sunk in the 21st century. Frozen forever in ridiculous poses, with iron armature sticking out of their limbs, cracked, as if liquid nitrogen had been poured over them, – plaster football players, pioneers, milkmaids, married couples and beauties encapsulate in their very appearance this state of suspense.

Today, in a country where comprehensive renewal has not occurred, these unhappy monuments to happiness look like remnants of Hellenic idealism, like naive and pure anthropological matrices in an inhuman utopian world. The colourful clothes hint at this – after all, in ancient times sculptures were polychromatic. Nevertheless, sculpture found in squares and parks is also a model of paradise in all the epochs and styles in which it appeared. Thus, the leitmotif of Ivan Plusch’s paintings is not so much a particular empire plunged into ruins, but a paradise forever lost to all mankind.