Alexey Kallima’s latest exhibition at Vladey in Moscow immerses viewers in uncanny, post-human landscapes. His vast charcoal-on-canvas works blur abstraction and realism, depicting a world seen through non-human eyes. At its core, a single figure – a postman – falls into oblivion and letters drift away.

A new solo exhibition of work by Alexey Kallima (b. 1969) has opened at Vladey art space in Moscow, a show full of mystery which starts even with the title translated from Russian as ‘A Postman Under Whom a Bridge Shattered’. At first glance, his huge, sanguine charcoal drawings on canvas appear abstract. Yet gradually you begin to realize that they are actually realistic landscapes, seen with a non-human eye and from a non-human perspective. There is a bird's eye view, or a sneaky glance by a creature crawling in the undergrowth, or a scene at the bottom of a narrow gorge where waterfalls roar and tumble. There are barely any human figures on these huge canvases, except for a tiny postman who falls into the river as a narrow suspension bridge collapses under his feet. These paintings are like the remnants of a dream that haunts your mind for hours after you wake up – you feel tension and drama, but somehow the reason behind it has slipped away. You have to look back at the artist's journey to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Alexey Kallima – a pseudonym derived from a species of butterfly, which he made his legal name – burst onto the Moscow art scene in the mid-1990s. His subjects were unusual, as was his life story. He was an ethnic Russian, born in Grozny, Chechnya, a region in the North Caucasus. An autonomous republic within Russia, Chechnya declared its independence after the collapse of the USSR. In 1994, Russia launched a war to bring the mountainous republic back under its rule. Kallima, who was teaching at a local art school at the time, was forced to flee the city with his family and become a refugee. In Moscow he became part of Radek, a group of left-wing artists and philosophers. His paintings romanticized bearded Chechens armed with Kalashnikovs who became heroic figures.

“At the time, everyone understood that beauty and truth were on their side,” the artist recalls when we meet in his small studio in Winzavod, Moscow’s former winery converted into contemporary art galleries. But soon he was told that these paintings could get him into trouble under a new anti-terrorism law. So he switched to a less incendiary subject: the Chechen Republic’s female parachute team. The team did exist in the early 1990s: Kallima had seen them train near the art school where he was teaching. But at a time of war, the subject seemed absurd and even more so now that the republic, though officially part of Russia, has adopted the ideology of conservative Islam. This incongruity is typical of Kallima – in his art, the real and the impossible always coexist in a strange, provocative symbiosis.

His football series, for example, is painted with fluorescent paint that is only visible in ultraviolet light. So when the normal lights come on, the image disappears, subtly suggesting that all the drama and excitement of sport is just an illusion – like art itself. Kallima won Russia’s National Innovation Prize in 2006 for an ‘invisible’ work Chelsea-Terek, dedicated to a match between British and Chechen teams that never took place. An installation, ‘The Rain Theorem’, which depicted the raging stands of an imaginary football match on four walls, was shown in the Russian pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Kallima has a background in academic painting, which he studied at the Krasnodar School of Art. But after moving to Moscow, he became interested in non-spectacular artistic practices – such as re-creating a very realistic-looking Marlboro packet, in a slightly larger size. “It is barely perceptible art, a statement against visual aggression, the omnipresent pressure of advertising,” he explains. Even in his large, figurative works, he often chooses modest materials that defy the materiality of oil and pigment: ‘disappearing’ fluorescent paint and charcoal. “It’s a minimalist material, it’s not visually aggressive,” Kallima says of charcoal. “It has no sheen and no texture. It has already been processed, burnt down, and yet something new can emerge from it, like a phoenix rising from the ashes”.

The self-organised gallery Frantsia (France), which he set up in the basement of an apartment building where he lived with his family, became a centre for radical exhibitions and performances. He created temporary ‘living sculptures’ from Scotch tape and the bodies of his artist friends, binding them together in bizarre poses, and set up installations of plastic glasses, forks and spoons – his protest against the ‘society of the spectacle’ (according to Guy Debord). Ironically, the gallery was closed down by the local authorities, who decided to turn the basement into a gym. But by then Kallima was no longer inspired by sport.

“I am a figurative artist, but I stopped drawing people because the image of the hero disappeared,” he recalls. After the shocking hostage-takings by Chechen terrorists at a school in the town of Beslan in 2001 and a theatre in Moscow in 2002, the romantic image of Chechen partisans shattered. When Kallima's early painting of resting Chechen warriors was shown on an exhibition at the State Tretyakov Gallery in 2020, it provoked a backlash on social media. The haunting image of the empty, post-human world of the dystopian future suddenly became reality during the pandemic. The artist recalls a strange feeling he experienced when he looked out of his window onto the street and “didn't see any people, they just disappeared”. However, as is often the case with artists, he feels quite comfortable away from the crowds of the city.

These days he spends most of his time in a small village on the shores of the Black Sea in southern Russia, surrounded by jungle and waterfalls. “I am a southerner; the sun fills me with energy. Like the ancients, I follow the sun”. Here he wants to create a residency for fellow artists, musicians, poets and philosophers, inspired by the fictional Kastalia from Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’, a utopian haven for intellectual life and creativity. So far, it looks more like a construction site in a muddy backyard. But the surroundings are spectacular and awe-inspiring, as you can see from the charcoal drawings in an exhibition about a postman and a bridge. Most are loosely based on the real landscapes surrounding the village – the Ashe River valley, the forests and the waterfalls. “A human figure appears in it only to disappear again,” Kallima says of the series. The artist explains that for him, a crumbling bridge symbolizes the breakdown of communication and relationships that did not survive the tragic events of recent years.

But there is also a more personal reason for the sense of catastrophe that underlies the series. The exhibition is a ‘requiem in black and white’, a tribute to Kallima’s friend, the artist Valery Chtak (1981–2024), who died last year of cancer at the age of 42. Despite the tragic fate of the postman, who falls into the river while his letters flutter helplessly around him, Kallima believes there is still hope: “everything disappears, but something remains. Letters that were important to someone, that could save someone’s life, float down the Ashe River and into the sea. And in the last work in the exhibition, the waves wash them ashore. They have not yet reached the person to whom they were addressed, but they have been saved and they can be read”.