Everything we see hides something else, and we always want to see what is hidden behind what is visible: at Lev Povzner's exhibition "Field of Miracles" at the Alina Pinsky Gallery, one cannot help recalling Magritte's textbook phrase

Everything we see hides something else, and we always want to see what is hidden behind what is visible: at Lev Povzner's exhibition "Field of Miracles" at the Alina Pinsky Gallery, one cannot help recalling Magritte's textbook phrase. Magritte, whom Lev Alexandrovich wittily parodies in a number of his canvases. Only with Povzner one sees even more than meets the eye, and than, perhaps, one might wish.

A vivid artist of the Moscow underground of the 1960s, Povzner is not the most frequent guest of the capital's galleries, so his sizeable display at the Alina Pinsky Gallery is a great rarity and a stroke of luck. The exhibition mixes various genres: there are landscapes, portraits, narrative compositions and still lifes, and it presents several postmodernist series beginning from the 1990s.

Povzner may only be playing at Surrealism, and with great humour and great melancholy, at least in the series on show, but his allegories and allusions to a whole range of artists from Dalí to Bruegel are no longer a game: they are a genuinely tangled tale, both about the history of art and about something personal. In the 2010s Povzner begins to encode literary references in his works too, brighter and at first glance more cheerful, yet at the same time more enigmatic.

The exhibition turns out to be rich in emotions and impressions, and engrossing enough to make one take a serious interest in the artist's work.