It was only in 1985, when my artistic studies brought me in contact with Soviet art, that I did realize how little known was about this world among Western people. What I had discovered was nothing but the tip of an iceberg of immense proportions.

I guessed, I had a feeling that behind the great commemorative facades of Socialism, behind those pictures full of images of war heroes, farmers, miners and astronauts who made their appearance in the TV news, behind those panels celebrating the glories of Five Year Plans and the October Revolution there must be another world, unknown to us.

The Revolution had certainly dragged an entire world into decay, changing radically a whole country, but it was evident that it had not destroyed yet the great Russian soul, its traditions and artistic capacities.
A proof of this was within easy reach, especially for those like us who were not properly informed: Nabokov, Rostropovich, Nurejev, Barishnikov, just to mention some of them, were not they superb artists? They certainly were and they still are. Could it be that a nation so good at literature, dance and music and full of talented artists had completely forgotten the visual arts?

According to Stalin’s regulations, as expressed by Zhdanov at the congress of writers in 1934, arts should be given a political meaning, a socialist content and national origins. Could it be that these regulations had swept away the artists’ expressive capacities, and filled so much their conscience as to transform them into some illustrators of state propaganda?

I could not believe all this myself, so I started in 1985 a sort of ideal “journey”, that led me to discover a diffused artistic tissue in every branch of visual arts and quite different from which Soviet propaganda had always showed us.

             - Painting

             - Russian Cinema and Films Posters

             - Satire and Political Propaganda