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Slowed and reverbed
July 12 - September 14, 2025
Oleg Ustinov
“What do I see before me?” This question opens the dialogue between a contemporary artwork and its viewer. To recognize oneself in the act of asking it is to grasp the first of the keys to the seemingly hermetic shell of the visual artifact. To pose the second question, one that naturally follows: “How is it made?” — is to set off on an absorbing journey into the depths of artistic language.
The analyst of this language, primarily modernist, is the multidisciplinary artist Oleg Ustinov, in his role as an abstract painter. A close analyst of this language, primarily that of modernism, is the multidisciplinary artist Oleg Ustinov in his role as an abstract painter. As a member of the post-conceptual generation, he envisions the artist as a figure who stands above styles and methods: someone capable of operating freely across them, deconstructing them into micro-elements, and reassembling new wholes from their fragments.
Oleg Ustinov’s multilayered collage-paintings are preceded by a multi-stage machinery. A non-objective drawing, created by hand and marked by expressive drips and splashes of paint which are the residue of emotional gestures, is photographed by the artist and turned into close-ups. He then manipulates this now-digital image in a photo editor, stretching and multiplying its elements, and prints the result directly onto the same canvas where the original image was made. By experimenting with glitches and distortions during the printing process, Ustinov generates machine-born glitch effects that are as unpredictable as the spontaneous drips of paint but rooted in digital error rather than physical gesture. The outcome of these layered procedures is a collage-like structure where the human and the digital converge.
According to the artist, such glitches and overlays expose the “skeleton” of the work: “What matters to me is the skeletal quality of painting, when the method is laid bare and perspective is constructed through indirect means. It becomes a kind of detective story. Everything in the painting repeats and distorts itself, which gives it rhythm and a hypnotic pull.”
In some of his most recognizable works from the 2010s, Ustinov draws formal and conceptual parallels between cultural phenomena such as the IDM genre of electronic music (British artists like Autechre and Aphex Twin) and the action painting practices of American abstract expressionism (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning).
The IDM (Intelligent dance music) style, which emerged at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, designated a community of performers who, in the words of Aphex Twin, understood electronic music as something meant for “brain dance,” rather then the body. It is characterized by an experimental blend of a "cold", synthesizer melody with an uneven, stuttering rhythm.
The dance refers to primordial wildness and witchcraft. The image of the artist as dancer-shaman is closely associated with Jackson Pollock, particularly as he appears in Hans Namuth’s documentary footage. Pollock’s invention of dripping, which involved flinging paint spontaneously without a brush onto a horizontal canvas without an orienting “top” or “bottom,” gave rise to a new kind of painting. Critic Clement Greenberg called it “all-over painting” (a form which, according to Ustinov, echoes the long, immersive live performances of the electronic duo Autechre).
In the works presented at this exhibition, created in recent years, Oleg Ustinov draws less from the detached beauty of IDM and more from the hip-hop technique of “slowed and reverbed” — a method based on slowing the tempo and adding echo, which renders the music more expansive, enveloping the listener in a multidimensional, viscous, and melancholically stirring sonic space. Shifting to very large formats (exceeding five meters), Ustinov has intensified the compositional complexity of his works, using up to ten layers of printing overlaid one atop another. Here, the non-objective image encounters not only its digital double, but the doubles of those doubles. Visual forms proliferate, merging in their multiplicity into a kind of collective rave that is slow, atmospheric, and heavy with emotional viscosity. In this layered accumulation, a sensuous experience of anxietal contemporaneity is made tangible, an experience that resonates within each viewer.
“What do I see before me?” This question opens the dialogue between a contemporary artwork and its viewer. To recognize oneself in the act of asking it is to grasp the first of the keys to the seemingly hermetic shell of the visual artifact. To pose the second question, one that naturally follows: “How is it made?” — is to set off on an absorbing journey into the depths of artistic language.
The analyst of this language, primarily modernist, is the multidisciplinary artist Oleg Ustinov, in his role as an abstract painter. A close analyst of this language, primarily that of modernism, is the multidisciplinary artist Oleg Ustinov in his role as an abstract painter. As a member of the post-conceptual generation, he envisions the artist as a figure who stands above styles and methods: someone capable of operating freely across them, deconstructing them into micro-elements, and reassembling new wholes from their fragments.
Oleg Ustinov’s multilayered collage-paintings are preceded by a multi-stage machinery. A non-objective drawing, created by hand and marked by expressive drips and splashes of paint which are the residue of emotional gestures, is photographed by the artist and turned into close-ups. He then manipulates this now-digital image in a photo editor, stretching and multiplying its elements, and prints the result directly onto the same canvas where the original image was made. By experimenting with glitches and distortions during the printing process, Ustinov generates machine-born glitch effects that are as unpredictable as the spontaneous drips of paint but rooted in digital error rather than physical gesture. The outcome of these layered procedures is a collage-like structure where the human and the digital converge.
According to the artist, such glitches and overlays expose the “skeleton” of the work: “What matters to me is the skeletal quality of painting, when the method is laid bare and perspective is constructed through indirect means. It becomes a kind of detective story. Everything in the painting repeats and distorts itself, which gives it rhythm and a hypnotic pull.”
In some of his most recognizable works from the 2010s, Ustinov draws formal and conceptual parallels between cultural phenomena such as the IDM genre of electronic music (British artists like Autechre and Aphex Twin) and the action painting practices of American abstract expressionism (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning).
The IDM (Intelligent dance music) style, which emerged at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, designated a community of performers who, in the words of Aphex Twin, understood electronic music as something meant for “brain dance,” rather then the body. It is characterized by an experimental blend of a "cold", synthesizer melody with an uneven, stuttering rhythm.
The dance refers to primordial wildness and witchcraft. The image of the artist as dancer-shaman is closely associated with Jackson Pollock, particularly as he appears in Hans Namuth’s documentary footage. Pollock’s invention of dripping, which involved flinging paint spontaneously without a brush onto a horizontal canvas without an orienting “top” or “bottom,” gave rise to a new kind of painting. Critic Clement Greenberg called it “all-over painting” (a form which, according to Ustinov, echoes the long, immersive live performances of the electronic duo Autechre).
In the works presented at this exhibition, created in recent years, Oleg Ustinov draws less from the detached beauty of IDM and more from the hip-hop technique of “slowed and reverbed” — a method based on slowing the tempo and adding echo, which renders the music more expansive, enveloping the listener in a multidimensional, viscous, and melancholically stirring sonic space. Shifting to very large formats (exceeding five meters), Ustinov has intensified the compositional complexity of his works, using up to ten layers of printing overlaid one atop another. Here, the non-objective image encounters not only its digital double, but the doubles of those doubles. Visual forms proliferate, merging in their multiplicity into a kind of collective rave that is slow, atmospheric, and heavy with emotional viscosity. In this layered accumulation, a sensuous experience of anxietal contemporaneity is made tangible, an experience that resonates within each viewer.
Konstantin Zatsepin