Olga Chernysheva's photographs show secluded corners and small people

Great art has always been created for its place: high painting for temples, luxurious painting for palaces, the Little Dutchmen painted for small merchants' living rooms, and so on up to modern art. It is produced for railway stations that have lost their former usefulness, ship arsenals, power plants, bus garages and wineries that have been converted into museums and galleries.

All the exhibitions of the Biennale at Red October are not just organic for the workshops of the former chocolate factory (in a traditional museum, a cultural treasure trove, they can be disconcerting), but are also a salvation for the abandoned spaces.

Moreover, in the workshops, already ennobled for the Baibakov Art Projects gallery, they show respectable European art: literally very pale, but intelligent paintings by the respected Belgian artist Luc Tuymans and the exquisitely sentimental photographs and videos of Olga Chernysheva, who with unique tact tells about quiet people, quiet places and modest joys.

For some reason, Chernysheva also often sees cacti: earlier in women's self-knitted hats, and at the exhibition "The Present Past" - as security guards. Large photo portraits of the quietest people in black, people without any qualities, are next to a photo of a strangely squalid place where cacti are sold. Tuymans' paintings and Chernysheva's projects are living out their last days at the factory, but the biennale is a graveyard of exhibitions, dozens of them open simultaneously, and you only have time to mention the good ones, and even then only towards the end.

In the same place where the abandoned candy factories are still in complete darkness and terrible desolation, they show more radical, socio-political exhibitions with telling names: “The New Old Cold War”, “One Revolution a Minute”, “Red – Red”. And here you can see one of the best exhibitions of recent years – “Russian Poor”, organized by Marat Gelman last year in Perm and with additions to the best now shown at “Red October”.

All the participants of this exhibition are very good, famous, smart and talented artists: Brodsky, Koshlyakov, Florensky, Polissky, Gutov, Bely, Osmolovsky, Zhelud, Sokov, Korina. There are no exceptions in the works either - at "Russian Poor" everyone is good, everything is in place. Even the long-known looks here not as boring.

Sculptures by Olga and Alexander Florensky, made from stumpy pieces of wood and used iron. There were so many of them that it seemed the authors had gotten carried away and could not stop. And Osmolovsky's "Breads" lost some of their complacency due to the strong proximity.

At “Russian Poor” each thing is self-sufficient, good in itself, and each one is exactly on the theme of the exhibition. And it is not about the fact that Russians are capable of making art out of an axe and an axe, not about the inexhaustible artistic potential of waste, poor materials. This is not a populist exhibition at all, but an aesthetic one – about the creation of forms, about the fact that art is eternal not because works of art do not die, but because of the eternal desire for a creative act that will take place, even if the artist only has drunk tea bags, rusty pieces of iron and charred pieces of wood at hand.

The main event at "Red October" is the exhibition "Russian Poor"