Untitled. From the series Popular Science Art

Pertsy is the duo of Oleg Petrenko and Ludmila Skripkina, which emerged within the 1980s Moscow Conceptualist milieu. They created works “in a new vein of psychedelic sociality.” According to Petrenko, at that time they “equally felt the roaring silence of late Soviet reality,” the obsessive, monotonous hum of everyday existence that became the foundation of their visual language. From the late 1980s onward, didactic charts borrowed from Soviet textbooks and popular science publications became a recurring formal element in their practice. These diagrams served as a matrix for meditations on the psychedelic stratification of reality. Over time, this conceptual device developed into their large‑scale series entitled Popular Science Art.

In Untitled, the artists present an absurdist chart illustrating the correlation between types of labor and daily energy expenditure in calories. According to this data, the highest expenditure is attributed to mowers and the lowest to tractor drivers. The surface of the work is adorned with counter‑reliefs in the shape of canisters, provoking a sense of bewilderment and disrupting the viewer’s perception of familiar imagery. Whereas in the late Soviet era the arbitrariness of official data stemmed from ideological concealment of economic indicators, by the turbulent early 1990s all numbers had completely lost credibility, becoming mere echoes of the former statistical system. It is precisely this mismatch between form and content, between the declarative and the actual, that draws the artists’ close attention. Ironically “reflecting reality,” they entrap the viewer in a hermeneutic snare—a space of paradoxes and inconsistencies where no unambiguous answers exist.