"Painting Jesus Isn't Dangerous"

“The police usually react with: ‘What are you drawing there? Jesus? Okay, then, finish up and move on.’” So says Arseny Bochkov, who over the past couple of years has been blanketing Moscow with images of Christ. His works, which are sometimes quite simple, leave a striking impression. They evoke an informal Orthodoxy that is full of life.

This is not the first time Moscow has seen religious symbolism crop up in unexpected places. For example, in 1999 a group of artists shrouded the dome of the Moscow Planetarium with red cloth displaying the golden letters ХВ for “Христос воскрес” – “Christ is risen,” a phrase commonly used as an Easter greeting. These letters are traditionally painted on Easter eggs in the Orthodox world. That year, Easter fell on the day before Cosmonautics Day, and the decoration of the giant egg-shaped dome was supposed to symbolize a reconciliation between scientific and religious worldviews, which had come into conflict in post-Soviet space. Today, getting the city’s permission for an installation like that would be difficult. Anyone playing fast and loose with religious symbols in contemporary Russia risks being charged with “offending the feelings of believers,” a violation that, post-Pussy Riot, in 2013 was elevated from an administrative to a criminal offense.

Nevertheless, around Easter each year, religiously themed street art continues to appear. In 2015, when Easter fell on Cosmonautics Day, the artist Alexander Zhunev glued an image of a crucified Gagarin onto the side of a building in Perm, his home town. The work was destroyed the next day but still managed to generate a lot of controversy. Zhunev got by with no more than a “legal review,” but locally the Church harshly condemned this work of art.

This year, the street artist Loketski painted a giant hunk of concrete to look like a traditional Slavic Easter cake. Loketski is famous for his protest art, such as his markup of a tombstone-like series of crumbling tiles embedded in a wall of earth with quotes from Russia’s constitution. A number of his works target the endless building of churches in Russia since about 2011. The artist is eager to explain his work while still maintaining his anonymity. Nobody knows his real name, and he always wears a mask when he meets with journalists, since the author of works like his cannot risk being identified.

In Loketski’s words, his attitude toward the church is summed up in a work titled “Chain” («Сеть»), which depicts Patriarch Kirill as a smiling Colonel Sanders in the KFC logo, with the letters KFC replaced by RPC (the Russian acronym for “Russian Orthodox Church” in Latin letters). This image appeared on the fence surrounding the construction site of a new residential complex where, as the artist explained, zoning adjustments had been made to replace some of the residential complex with a new church. In Loketski’s words:

All this was done behind the scenes, without public discussion or consulting the apartment buyers, so, on the sly, what really happened in these buildings was that people came together and agreed that a church would be built there. It seems to me that, at the time, those who wanted to attend a church there and were able to arrange for it did that, and the church’s desire to be on every street corner is dictated exclusively by the desire of the ROC to grow as a corporation.

Even his concrete paskha Easter cake came with a commentary criticizing the church. On his Instagram page, in addition to sending Easter wishes to the faithful, Loketski expressed indignation at priests who call on their parishioners to attend church despite the coronavirus epidemic.

Another Instagramer, After the Icon («После иконы», on Instagram as after_icon), held the opposite view, bemoaning the fact that parishioners were forbidden from attending church for Easter, since a true Christian should always be ready for death, a view supported by several comments on this thread.

The ideologue behind the After the Icon project, Anton Belikov, explained that all of his contributors are Orthodox Christians who are guided exclusively by canon. The project includes religiously-themed street art, and Belikov also organizes exhibitions of Orthodox art. Bringing art onto the street was motivated by a desire to take icons out of the confines of churches to where more people would see them.

“We are not seeking any truth; for us, it is contained in Scripture, and we don’t need anything beyond that. I just feel it’s important to bring Christianity to places where people are suffering,” says Belikov, who used to teach art history at the Surikov Art Institute. His teaching career came to an abrupt end when he sprayed paint onto photographs about the war in Ukraine that were part of an exhibition at Moscow’s Sakharov Center. “I defaced the photo exhibit about Ukrainian Nazis. For that, I was fired from my job. I became bored and decided that I should go to Donbass. I brought an icon to one of the churches and also did some drawing there. In the Gorlovka area, I did a cycle about the Passion in a bombed-out building, and so began the project.”

Alexander Tsypkov, another contributor to the After the Icon project, offers a different version of how the idea arose: “Anton and I were in Yaroslavl Oblast looking at the ruins of churches and wondered why they were so neglected. Who was supposed to be taking care of them? And we started to draw there, without asking anyone’s permission – canonical icons right where they were supposed to be, even though the church didn’t have a roof.”

Last December, the head of the synodal Department of External Church Relations, Metropolitan Hilarion, appeared on the Rossiya 24 television station and said that the images made as part of the After the Icon project were consistent with the church’s teachings, that there was nothing wrong with them being in public spaces. Nevertheless, public maintenance workers destroy the works, along with other unsanctioned art.

Religious symbols are deeply embedded in street art culture, deeper than the level of any given school, and have shaped the graffiti subculture. In recent years it is not unusual to see the ichthys, the Christian fish symbol, used as a tag, or religious inscriptions written in Church Slavonic lettering. The person who for many years has been leaving little triangles with paint dripping down from their base has become legendary. Your average passerby would probably not be able to decipher the symbolism, but fellow graffiti artists (“writers” is the international term of art) understand that the triangles symbolize the Holy Trinity and the dripping paint represents the blood of Christ.

Victor Treugolnik (Triangle) has a reputation for avoiding contact even with other street artists and lives like a hermit in an apartment where each wall is covered with a large triangle visible only under ultraviolet light. He gets around town exclusively by foot or on a bicycle and paints the city’s walls with abstract pictures that usually feature colorful triangles symbolizing God. “When I decided to become an artist, I wanted to draw the most awesome thing I could – the Creator,” Victor says after consenting to an audio call. “I learned to draw and tried to convey the idea in various forms; I experimented, trying circles and rays, but the triangle struck me as the most appropriate symbol. And inside them are various details, shapes that somehow represent our entire world.” Treugolnik explained that he grew up in an unhappy family and took a long time to find himself, traveling through various “worlds,” until one day in the Metro he by chance opened a Bible and immediately felt “at home.”

Before Arseny Bochkov began to paint the face of Jesus everywhere, he drew giant whales on city walls that became a popular sight. “The whale was also a symbol of something huge, some special being impervious to danger,” the artist said. “I drew my first Jesus not giving much thought to what he meant, without much thought at all, but then my friend asked me to draw him all over Moscow, and in the process an understanding of what he symbolizes began to develop.”

Several hundred Jesuses have appeared in Moscow. By now, Arseny says, he can complete a multicolored drawing in one minute. His portrayal is not automatic and always takes on new features.

At first, he was stern, like an icon painted on an Ivan the Terrible battle standard. But with time I began to wonder whether Jesus, who preached love, could really have been a symbol of war. I went to exhibitions and picked up on a different image. At some point he even began to take on my own features or to simply express my mood at the time. For example, if I was sad, he was sad. I particularly like the one where his eyes are closed. It’s as if he’s alive.

Arseny gives the impression of being very much alive. He’s a friendly and somewhat ethereal 29-year-old. “People usually imagine street artists as an almost criminal element, but for the most part they are such sweet, kind, skinny kids who simply bring love into the world,” he laughs. Arseny grew up in an Orthodox family, went to an Orthodox school, and “read more Orthodox books than regular ones.” With time, he not only grew tired of his parents’ religiosity; he understood that it would in no way satisfy his spiritual needs. He has distanced himself from any sorts of rites. Arseny says that he doesn’t try to preach, and the last thing he wants is for the people who see his drawings to head for church. “For me, Jesus is not a religious symbol, but a symbol of love, of goodness, of an ability to give your life for all of humanity, and also of youth rebelling against old rules. That is what I have been trying to draw. I see the Bible as a work of art and Jesus as a character from a book.”

Arseny says that he has been interested in the Protestant movement, as well as Dostoyevsky’s works. As part of the process of figuring out why he draws the image of Christ on city streets, Arseny has established a free art school where “nobody sits in the center,” but everyone just draws something related to the assigned theme together and then discusses their work. A whole team has formed around him that signs its work with the tag “that’s everyone” («это все»). Its art is usually associated with religious themes. “Painting Jesus isn’t dangerous,” Arseny believes, having been picked up by the police only once and released after he wrote an explanation. “If anyone got upset and the law intervened, I’d just explain that my message is purely positive, and I think they’d understand. I could also get people who approve of me to speak on my behalf. Once they gave a talk about me at a theological institute, and one church even reposted my Jesus on their page.”

Traditional street art culture has not typically shown great respect for religious symbols, because they are seen as too obvious. “To put it bluntly, dashing off a fish – that’s not something you came up with, and there’s nothing new there,” says Anna Danilova, a student and habitué of nighttime graffiti sorties (her name has been changed at her request). “The role of street art in the city is to create a new mythology. You think up a symbol that weaves itself into the fabric of the city. When you use images that have become ridiculously timeworn, you’re not making any contribution and you’re riding a two-thousand-year-old horse, driving it on with a crucifix – first of all, it’s boring, and second of all, terribly pretentious.” 

Sometimes it is not the Church itself but ordinary believers who raise objections to what may or may not be religious symbolism in street art. Last summer in Yekaterinburg an uproar erupted over a work produced for the Stenograffiya street-art festival (“Stenograffiya” is a play on the Russian word for stenography, which has only one f, and the fact that stena is the word for wall). The work was simply a black cross on a red background that covered an elongated median at a busy intersection. Oxana Ivanova, director of Yekaterinburg’s Museum of Sanctity, Profession of Faith, and Asceticism in the Twentieth Century Urals, posted a statement that she didn’t want to “trample the cross with her feet” (the arms of the cross stretched between two pedestrian crosswalks). The post provoked a wave of public indignation. A month later, a demonstration was held on the site to demand that the work be destroyed. Its author, the artist Pokras Lampas, agreed to revise his work by altering the cross’s outline. Interestingly, the artist had not intended the work to be religious – it was actually an homage to avant-garde-era experimentalism. A calligrapher, Pokras had embedded within the cross a quote from Malevich: “I have untied the knots of wisdom and freed the consciousness of color. I have overcome the impossible and filled in chasms with my breath. We suprematists lay down the road for you.”

The experimental art of the early twentieth century is greatly admired by street artists, and not only because they have been influenced by the movement’s aesthetics. It was the avant-garde that first promoted the idea of bringing art out of the gallery and onto the street. And, as for redefining the uses of religious symbolism, it was Malevich’s Black Square, which he exhibited high up in a corner where an icon would traditionally be placed, that proclaimed a quest for a new artistic language to express religious and mystical feelings.

In Russia, artists who revolutionize art have tended to make use of Christian symbols, having grown up, one way or another, under the influence of tsarist-era Orthodox culture. Malevich himself had a work titled Suprematist Madonna, where the image of mother and child comprises an arrangement of geometric figures. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, whose painting Bathing of a Red Horse is known throughout the world as a symbol of a new, “Red” era, produced a number of Madonna and child works, including his Red Madonna and Mother, which featured a Russian peasant mother and child. Another member of the Russian avant-garde who made extensive use of religious themes was Natalia Goncharova, who placed figures from the Bible into art stylized in keeping with the Russian lubok tradition. In 1912, the church spoke out against her primitivist cycle Four Evangelists, which was part of an exhibition with the unseemly name The Donkey’s Tale.

To avoid conflicts going forward, the organizers of Stenograffiya have decided to bring in a representative from the Russian Orthodox Church to take part in initial discussions of the works. “We will have a consultant who, when necessary, will help convey the idea behind Stenograffiya to the religious community,” a statement posted on the popular social media site Vkontakte explained. “A representative of the eparchy will have a say in controversial questions where someone might see a risk of conflict with believers.” The festival’s press service clarified that this consultant “would not be a permanent member of the committee to select art objects,” but some brush this nuance aside. Loketski has expressed his concerns: “For me, the appearance of an ROC representative on the festival’s organizing committee is an example of church expansionism. They’re not calling this approval of works, but in essence, that’s what it is. In my view it’s the introduction of church censorship.”

But to the question of whether or not the concept of “Orthodox street art” is an oxymoron, since street art has traditionally expressed protest against all systems, dogmas, and religions, he responds in the negative. “Street art is not strictly opposed to the mainstream – there are just works that are against and those that are for, and the two don’t get in each other’s way. They can coexist in a single space.” Loketski offers the Ukrainian artist Sergei Radkevich as an example of successful “contemporary icon painting.”

Radkevich lives in Lviv and is renowned for the edgy images he playfully incorporates into urban and rural landscapes. His works have also made it into galleries across the world. As a Ukrainian, Radkevich exists in a different context, including a different religious context: Lviv is in Western Ukraine, where Greek Catholicism predominates. But the artist, rather than seeing himself as belonging to any one tradition, considers himself to be a product of a contemporary art that teaches dialogue with its audience. “Now (for nine years), I have been trying to seek out a certain iconographic ‘new language’ that would observe old canons with a contemporary visual plastic, and also to find communication with the viewer, with time, and with the relevancy of the icon in our time.”

In Russia, Radkevich is little known, although street artists tend to be familiar with him. He began working with Christian symbols a decade ago, in 2010.

No discussion of the origins of this trend in contemporary Russian street art would be complete without mentioning the artist Pavel Pukhov: Pasha183 is the most famous figure to come out of the Russian street scene. Shortly before his death in 2013, he was very much in the news, including the Western press. In 2012, while participating in a festival in the town of Vyksa in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, he created a Madonna and child, although he had been invited there to paint a different work. “The decision to create this image, in my view, wasn’t spontaneous or random,” according to Pukhov’s friend Polina Borisova, who has curated several of his shows. “Pasha took a lively interest in philosophy, mysticism, and religion. He studied and analyzed information from a variety of sources.” The image was painted onto the entrance to a very old, brick structure housing an electrical transformer. The artist fixed a hinged panel onto the recessed opening where he painted the work to make it resemble a folding icon. The painting was done in a kitschy style, about as far as you could get from the canon: the black and white Madonna holding a baby in a dramatic pose looks like a sophisticated, scantily clad woman.

This is Pasha183’s only iconographic work, but, interestingly, he also produced many works with religious connotations, including one of his last works: an image of an angel lying on the ground holding a sign reading: “Give for a ticket home” (top, right). According to Borisova:

Pasha sincerely believed in the artist’s higher calling. At some point, art became ministry. For example, the canvas The Exploit is Our Cause was free of any element of showmanship or sarcasm. Pasha truly believed that. He was convinced that he should bring eternal truths to people, and that if he did, the world would become better. This is fully within the Christian tradition. His mind held a mix of Christian and communist ideology. But in terms of many of his messages, they are compatible.

Borisova believes that Pasha was not a typical representative of the street art community, where “your own ego comes first,” and that he should probably be “viewed within the Russian context of the artist as missionary.”

The missionary aspect of Russian art and street art that deals with religious themes resonates with this tradition. Orthodox activists who go out onto the street to preach; protest art that, in its struggle for justice, transforms the face of Patriarch Kirill into a meme; Arseny Bochkov, who believes that street art has the power to make things better – they all have something of the missionary in them. But is there really no danger involved in painting Jesus on the streets of contemporary Russia? Arseny’s assurances that everything would work out fine even if he does someday face charges still implies that prosecution is a possibility. That is why the organizers of one exhibition that Arseny participated in asked him to paint over an image of Jesus where the Savior had closed eyes. They were afraid that this free interpretation of a religious symbol might “offend the feelings” of a believer.