The Moscow Museum of Modern Art has unveiled a retrospective exhibition of the work of Rostan Tavasiev. Curators Anna Arutunyan and Andrei Egorov invite us to discover the artist’s idiosyncratic perspective in which he sees the entire universe as his playground.

As a playful nod to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, when you enter Zaylaris, a solo exhibition of work by Rostan Tavasiev (b. 1976) you find art where you least expect to see it. One of the columns supporting the high ceiling of the building is covered in artificial fur and appears to look at you from above with round toy eyes. As you walk past an old fireplace in the corner, you notice something unusual: there is a fake fire inside it, also made of fur. Playfulness is a cornerstone of Tavasiev’s art. He first made his name in the art world back in the 2000s with a signature technique he invented called begemotopis. This literally translates from Russian as ‘painting with a hippo’, but Tavasiev himself prefers the term ‘Hip-Pop-Art’, coined by art critic Kate Sutton. Essentially, it involves painting with stuffed toys, where the toy itself becomes part of the artwork. He was working on one of these Hippo-paintings when I recently visited him in his studio for an interview, a couple of days after the exhibition opened. “The process itself is great fun. You play with toys on a canvas, and finally you end up with a painting. What could be better than that?” he explained, pointing to four tiny hippos and a surprisingly large, furry frog on a nearly finished artwork. Yet this game emerged from very serious reflections on the nature of art.

Coming from a family of artists, Tavasiev trained as a jeweller at the Carl Fabergé School of Applied and Decorative Arts and as a graphic designer at the Stroganov Academy in Moscow. He also took classes in contemporary art at IPSI, a private institute founded by renowned curator Joseph Backstein. He invented Hip-Pop-Art after trying his hand at more conventional painting and drawing techniques. Tavasiev recalls that this occurred while he was on an artist residency at Cité internationale des arts in Paris, following his first visit to the Pompidou Centre. “I had never seen so many abstract paintings before. I felt those subtle spiritual vibrations described by Kandinsky in his book [ed. ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ published in 1911).

The emotional world of one person is transmitted to another through these dabs of colour. But I also felt a certain emptiness – I felt that I was missing something: characters and plot.” While walking back from the museum through the Marais district, Tavasiev, who had already experimented with incorporating toys into his art, had an idea: “Why not try making the dabs of colour using a toy?” There is a performative side to the process: he cites the performances of Yves Klein as one of his influences. For his ‘Anthropometry’ series, Klein used naked women as his “human paintbrushes”, asking them to cover their bodies in blue paint and make imprints on canvases while a live orchestra played music composed by the artist. “The effect of this action, unveiled in front of an audience, was much stronger than that of the imprints themselves, which is a bit sad. You get only a faint impression of the experience the artist had while creating the artwork. I thought that if the process itself became the artwork, I could put more into the canvas,” Tavasiev explained. Thus, the process-based artwork becomes its own documentation: “It is all in front of you: the whole process of the physical contact between the toy, the paint, and the canvas”.

The MMOMA exhibition shows how Tavasiev is testing the limits of art in different media, employing the same deceptively playful and light-hearted approach. Unlike a traditional retrospective, it is not organised chronologically but follows the internal dramaturgy of the works themselves. One room is dedicated to the 2015 project ‘Burn!’, his most abstract series to date, in which bunches of orange-coloured fake fur symbolise flashes of fire spreading over fibreboard and paper. Fire is notoriously difficult to draw or paint, Tavasiev notes. “It is virtually impossible to depict, especially in sculpture — even Bernini would not attempt it”. He once noticed that thin pieces of orange fur looked like flames from a fire, and thus the idea for the project was born. He claims that it was not inspired by any tragic news at the time: “Life is nothing but a sequence of catastrophes,” he remarks casually. “The whole universe is an ongoing explosion. Whatever you do, it will coincide with one crisis or another.” Tavasiev refuses to define himself as either a painter or a sculptor, as he is afraid of becoming constrained by the limits of one technique.

Logically enough, he has finally come up with the idea for a project on a superhuman scale that cannot be realised with currently available technology. It started with the observation that science fiction books rarely depict art. Tavasiev attempted to fill this gap by speculating on what art might look like in an imaginary, high-tech future world. He dreams of creating artworks in outer space, rearranging planetary nebulae and turning them into giant sculptures. He wants to transform the universe itself into a landscape park. “My goal is to lay the groundwork so that future generations, with their more advanced technology, won't have to start from scratch,” the artist says. “Of course, the things I envisage today will seem very naive then, just as sci-fi film posters from the 1960s seem now.” He employs traditional techniques such as painting and sculpture to bring his ideas to life, but also consults with astrophysicists to ensure they are at least theoretically feasible. It is characteristic for Tavasiev that most of these imaginary space sculptures resemble giant bunnies.

Is it satirical? Is it ironic? The answer is not as simple as it might seem. While the irony in Tavasiev’s works is obvious, what or who it is directed at is far less clear. When I ask if his irony is aimed at spectators who become emotional over all things cute and furry, or at the overly serious approach to art as a spiritual process, he vehemently rejects both suggestions. “If I’m being ironic about something, it’s probably about myself,” Tavasiev observes. “I am very afraid of being serious and pretentious. With ambitions such as the conquest of outer space, if I don’t balance it all out with irony, I could easily become a serious megalomaniac,” he admits with surprising sincerity. “There is just one small step from the artistic process to a clinical diagnosis.” Yet, like all artists, he takes his work very seriously and sees no contradiction in this. “It is a spiritual practice, a therapy, a way to communicate with the outside world. It is the main substance of my life. That is why I try to avoid pathos – because I want to remain sober and maintain contact with reality”.

No other artist on the Russian scene draws inspiration from the world of childhood as consistently as Tavasiev. He feels quite at home in a world of plush toys and sci-fi imagery. “You could call it a refusal to grow up,” he says. He is not alone in this, though. According to the artist, we are living in an age of perpetual adolescence. “The only stage in life that keeps expanding is the period between childhood and adulthood. It didn’t exist before, when people had to work in a field or wear a military uniform from a young age – now, even middle-aged people are painting their hair blue. I assume it's the life stage where everyone wants to be.”

Some of his projects seem to be ahead of their time, while others are so topical that they could not be exhibited in a Russian museum nowadays. The sculptures from the ‘It’s complicated!’ series that premiered at Multimedia Art Museum in 2013 and are now part of MMOMA’s collection are not included in the current exhibition. These cute, cuddly, wide-eyed imaginary creatures had their own social pages and cheerfully communicated with each other, visitors, and members of the art community. “Some art critics were really irritated when they commented on their posts. As a critic, how can you argue with an artwork?” Tavasiev recalls. In hindsight, it looks like a premonition of the era of AI chatbots, but at the time, there was a real person behind each account – all of them prominent members of the art community who revelled in the anonymity that the project gave them. It is not possible to display the series in a state or city funded museum now since it used Facebook as a platform, and it is currently banned in Russia. Its owner, Meta, has been declared an extremist organisation by the Russian authorities. The artist and curators considered transplanting the project to another social media platform but ultimately rejected the idea, choosing instead to leave the sculptures in storage. Perhaps, for furry toys as well as for people, there are moments when silence speaks louder than words.