A cheeky boy and a wise old man, two figures in one, Mikhailov passes a merciless sentence on contemporaneity without uttering a single word. Powerful and sometimes graphic, these images confront the viewer with unexpected juxtapositions: despair and hope, beauty and suffering, disgust and Homeric laughter. Each page strikes like a blow to the face. Whereas blackness around each image fills the pages, framing them like petroleum or fertile black soil.

Kateryna Filyuk