In our grandmother’s apartment, the most mysterious, most forbidden, and most desirable object was the sideboard. Behind its glass doors stood porcelain wonder-animals, a psychedelic decanter in the shape of a curved fish with a shiny ball in its mouth, assorted cups, salad bowls, glasses, and two twin figurines of girls in folk costumes—kokoshniks and sarafans. Touching them was strictly forbidden; all we could do was gaze through the alluring glass into that fairy-tale portal of marvels. One day, my brother and I couldn’t resist; when our grandmother went out to the shop, we opened the forbidden door and started playing with the figurines. An awkward move—and one of the twins fell, her lovely head in its kokoshnik magically separating from the body and gaining an independent life. The play didn’t stop; on the contrary, it became even more exciting and interesting, gaining new characters—a zombie monster and a talking killer head. The anxiety of waiting for the inevitable scolding over the broken porcelain mixed with the fun and absorption in new storylines… A journey into a strange and captivating world that resists the rational laws of normality.

The sideboard is the protagonist of Pasha Bezor’s narrative—a vessel of memory, a portal to the protected world of childhood fantasies, a cenotaph or a makeshift hut—a fairy-tale self-built structure transported from the world of childhood into the aggressive environment of adulthood, where it sprouts shoots of private eclecticism, home ornamentation, obsessive collecting of oddities, and Zhek-art. All these phenomena are inexplicable from the standpoint of rational behaviour. They are all symptoms that have broken through the mask of palatable social reality—of comprehensible utilitarian conduct. They are not consciously recognised or problematised by the subject themselves, because they seem like frivolous childish fooling around, yet they can tell more about one’s life and fantasies than the person themselves could.

In Pasha Bezor’s sideboard (he is a passionate collector and connoisseur of Soviet design), things, images, and visual languages mutate, split apart, and reassemble just as they did in my childhood story. The obsessive repetition of “primitive” imagery, typical of children’s drawings or art brut, creates a visual layer of complex morphology, rooted in the artist’s deep research into late-Soviet aesthetics, book illustration, and animation.

Pasha Bezor weaves the results of his attentive observations and research into his artistic practice, creating a punk world of colour distinguished by a particular way of seeing; the grimace of distortions and mutations of the familiar, quietly slipping into the past; the naivety of lubok forms and urban oddities; the obsessive repetition of “trivial” images, entrenched—like the indestructible root-plastic of allotment gardens—in private eclecticism: the unconscious urge to deform everyday objects, to make them unique, handmade, bearing the imprint of your very own life…

Bezor is not a detached researcher of the aesthetics of urban naivety, nor a scientific-sounding critic, but a clever mischief-maker and, of course, a good-natured soul, constructing an illogical self-built structure out of thin battens, sticks, offcuts, and scraps of humanity—childhood memories, handcrafted visual culture, and one-of-a-kind objects that have become subjects of careful preservation and passionate collecting.

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Liza Tsikarishvili