The Russian Painter
Artemis fled a war, fought a felony, and spent 10 months in ICE captivity. It's a good thing he can paint.
On a strip of 6x6 cloth nailed to a wall, dozens of abstracted bodies congregate on a grey floor. Some lie on cots, others sit together at a table, and someone in the bottom-right corner screams with hands held high. The deranged painting, made with acrylic and charcoal, is called “Common Cell Room.” It depicts living conditions in the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest ICE detention facility in the northeast. Its creator, a Targaryen-looking 28 year-old, makes sure to point out a fallacy in the building’s name: “It is not a processing center. It is a prison.”
The MVPC, per his description, is a shipping container that holds 60-70 men in the same open area. There are no cells; it’s just one big dusty pod. All within it are immigrants without enough documentation to appease the insatiable Trump administration. Some have criminal histories–murderers, drug-dealers, petty thieves–but many are innocent, harmless, asylum-seeking people who have found themselves trapped in the Middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania, because of a nightmarish turn of events, both in their home countries, and the one they sought refuge in.
There have been substantial reports of physical and psychological abuse by guards. Namely chokeslams, spitting in the faces of detainees, the withholding of food and water, and illicit discrimination towards non-English speakers. Last August, three people were stabbed with a shank by a fellow inmate. Just three weeks ago, a Chinese citizen awaiting a hearing was found hanging dead in the shower.
Artemis recently spent 10 months there.
Shortly after his release, we met at an art studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It was a bright Sunday afternoon and we were the only ones in the building. His allotted plot was ripe with coconut water, Pelligrino, fresh fruit, scattered tubes of paint and brushes, a few large-scale canvas’ hanging from the wall, and thick stacks of sketches he drew while in ICE custody. At first, his demeanor was calm, his speech thoughtful. I was surprised to hear him liken MVPC to an involuntary, and far less serene, ashram–a spiritual retreat popular among Buddhists for intense inward reflection.
“I tried to find the divine in everything,” he said in his thick Russian accent, “and this helped me a lot. I was optimistic all the time. I had no other choice. If you’re there and not optimistic, you are dying.”
When speaking about “Common Cell Room,” his tone flipped. His eyes got twice as big and his voice tensed with frustration while pointing hard at areas of the painting: “One row, two row, three row, four row, 60 people, one big common room. Always phone calls, always fights in the bathroom, people taking shits, fights over the microwave…Listen, see this,” he jabs his finger on a figure in red slouched down, “they use a piece of the dice tube, this one crazy person from El Salvador, a real thug, he was scraping the dice tube on the floor every day to sharpen it. Everyday, day and night, nonstop. He made money from it.”
“The murderers,” he continued, “were the nicest people. The biggest drug dealers, they were such genuine, gentle people. Those people who were doing small crimes were stupid, low intellect, ill-mannered, loud and obnoxious. We were all living in a fucking zoo. It was so intensively bad. It was pure fucking hell, my brother, it was so wicked bad.”
He kept himself occupied by reading Kafka, playing chess, praying, and obsessively sketching. “I was drawing scenes from our life,” he said, “and they [other inmates] were like, ‘Oh, look, look, it’s me, it’s me.’ In the evenings they looked through my drawings. It was entertaining for us.”
Artemis is not a famous painter. He is known by some curators and collectors, but subsists on his entranced work ethic, inordinate style, and occasional modeling gigs. His art blends purity with the abrasiveness of reality; it’s like something out of a demented toddler’s daydream. He uses vibrant colors on tragic figures, hides good and evil in between what may look like unintelligible scribbling, and is wholly absorbent of however his fortunes unfold. He has an intense, at times unnerving presence, punctuated by sea green eyes that burn through you. There’s a persuasion to his mannerisms that I’ve only found among truly possessed artists, who, for whatever reason, often fly too close to the sun.
During our two hours of conversation, Artemis would appear stoic, talking about divinity and the treasured friends he made while locked up, then in the next moment radiate with intoxicating emotion while telling a story, no matter how riveting or insignificant its content actually was. It’s as if an internal pendulum would not stop swinging. Given the sheer insanity of the past five years of his life, solid ground has not only been hard to come by: it’s become nearly impossible to trust.
There is a place in the center of Moscow called the Lanceray House. It is an eight-floor, neo-Gothic building that was utilized during the October Revolution of 1917, where the Bolsheviks’ Red Guards fired countless rounds of artillery from its scaffolding. After its construction, destruction, then reconstruction, it became what we here in America would call a shared living space. A more astute comparison may be a dirtier–and much less publicized–version of the Chelsea Hotel.
In the last decade of his life, painter and sculptor Eugene Lanceray lived in one of the building's apartments. He is now considered a hero in Russian art for both documenting the aftermath of Lenin’s victory and painting an astounding mural in Moscow’s Kazansky train station.
Nearly a century after his passing, the Lanceray House remains a solace for bohemian classes of artists. It’s a place where musicians, architects, playwrights, and painters alike live and breathe their own, and each other’s, work. While attending Gubkin Russian State University in the late 2010s, Artemis Lyiskov visited with some friends, and was struck by how its interior decay was contrasted by the liveliness of the artists who inhabited it. The building cast a spell, causing the promising student to move in and radically redirect his life towards whatever the energy oozing out of that building was.
See, he was supposed to be a chemist. Raised in St. Petersburg, he grew up attending a school for those gifted in science, then headed to his country’s capital city to obtain his degree. He was a dedicated student, winning Science Olympiad contests in high school and working in a research laboratory while in Moscow. He had always doodled in class, but didn’t give much consideration to visual art as a legitimate path.
But upon entering the membrane of the Lanceray House, Artemis was simultaneously introduced to the Moscow creative scene. He befriended artists, hung out in their studios, and tagged along with them to exhibitions around the city. One painter in particular, from Monteparnasse, Paris, took him to an exhibit featuring the work of Amedeo Modigliani, a boundary-pushing traditionalist from Tuscany. The poetry in Modigliani’s work was a flashbulb moment. Artemis decided it was time to take the leap.
He took a trip to Beijing, bought charcoal and oil pastels, and began his first painting. It was of a Chinese girl carrying a goldfish in a plastic bag—no doubt in the vein of Modigliani, whose subjects were often pedestrian. After this, the itch became unscratchable. He devoted himself to art, and within a few years, things had begun to snowball: a move to Istanbul led to the sale of a few paintings, these sales led to trips across Europe, these trips led to handshakes and exhibition invites, and the culmination led Artemis to embark on his nomadic ways. The important thing to note is that this country-hopping only began as voluntary.
In the winter of 2022, after a stint in Spain, Artemis returned to Russia. It was not long until the Putin administration launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, attacking their military strongholds and air defense systems with missiles launched onto multiple fronts. Artemis, like many peers at risk of being drafted, chose to flee. Because of this resistance to fighting, paired with previous troubles he faced with the government1, he escaped by stealthily crossing the Belarus border, eventually making his way back towards Istanbul, where he had some friends. From there, he embarked on what he calls a “war trip” across six countries, culminating in Athens, Greece. As the self-mythologizing Artemis tells it, while standing at the feet of Athena’s statue as the wind blew west, he decided it was time to cross the Atlantic.
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