Kirill Makarov’s Unveiled: Painting in the Age of Post-Produced Reality
Since the decline at the turn of the new millennium of analogue technology – which, by its very nature, depended on the presence of a real object or event in order to present (or even manipulate) reality – digital instruments no longer simply record the world but possess the capacity to generate it from scratch. Virtual reality, for example, is a direct byproduct of the digital revolution. Within this shift, reality itself begins to resemble a constructed environment: assembled, edited, and recomposed through technological processes. It is therefore not surprising that, in an age when nearly every moment of armed conflict is recorded, circulated, and archived, reality reaches us mainly through fragments – digital images and videos left behind by these events.
The violence of war enters the public sphere almost entirely through these mediated forms. Images captured by phones, drones, surveillance systems, satellites, and news broadcasts transform distant events into visual data that can be watched, shared, and consumed. Yet in doing so, they do not simply document violence; they actively shape how it is perceived. Cropped frames, unstable perspectives, compression, and abrupt edits become part of a visual grammar through which conflict is understood. What appears as immediate evidence is, in fact, a constructed field of perception in which witnessing, interpretation, and spectacle are inseparable.
It is precisely within this condition that Kirill Makarov’s Unveiled takes form, responding to the mediated nature of contemporary reality by reconstructing war environments from the scattered remnants of media imagery. Photographs and individual frames extracted from videos the artist found online are treated as spatial coordinates, allowing scenes to be reassembled as three-dimensional settings, with varying degrees of precision depending on the quality and quantity of available material. In this process, the image of war is reorganized, interrogated, and recontextualized. Rather than reproducing the spectacle of the original footage, Makarov slows it down, isolates it, and transforms it into a 3D space that can be examined from multiple viewpoints.
However, these digital reconstructions constitute only one stage in the making of the final work. The virtual environments, which could easily evolve into video games or simulation software, are deliberately displaced from the computer screen. Makarov extracts them from the digital realm and subjects them to a slower, material process. These reconstructed spaces are reinterpreted through manual gesture and observation, translated first into sketches and then into paintings. In this transition from digital model to physical image, the work shifts from simulation to interpretation, introducing distance, ambiguity, and authorship into what might otherwise appear as a seamless reconstruction.
The resulting paintings exist as physical spaces suspended between factual documentation and artistic construction. While the digital traces from which they originate seem to promise direct access to reality – even, paradoxically, in cases where the original material was a fake – their passage through multiple layers of mediation ultimately destabilizes that promise. In doing so, these works expose the fragile and ambiguous status of the digital trace, suggesting a crucial insight: what we perceive as reality today is itself the product of a post-production process.
In this sense, Unveiled resonates with the reflections of Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), where images of war appear to bring viewers closer to events while simultaneously framing and aestheticizing them. Photographs and videos may document real occurrences, yet they cannot convey their full context or meaning. They isolate moments, detach them from their causes and consequences, and, through repetition, risk transforming suffering into something familiar, even consumable. Makarov’s work inhabits precisely this paradox: images both reveal and distance, inform and obscure.
In its final gesture, the series Unveiled reveals not only reconstructed spaces but the very mechanisms through which reality is assembled and understood. By translating mediated fragments into spatial models and, ultimately, into paintings, Kirill Makarov exposes a condition in which experience is no longer rooted in direct encounter, but in the ongoing interpretation of images – especially those that depict war, violence, and human suffering. Each work, marked by the date of its appearance in the media, ties these reconstructions to specific moments of circulation, underscoring that what is being represented is not the event itself, but its mediated emergence within a network of information. What remains is a space of uncertainty, where images oscillate between evidence and construction, and where meaning is continuously negotiated rather than fixed. In this suspended state, Unveiled no longer offer certainty about what happened, but instead reveals the fragile, mediated conditions through which reality itself comes into view.
Antonio Geusa