The artist made the series of these works in late 2006 for the exhibition "Sleeping Quarters" at the Moscow Museum of Architecture. “Cots” is an example of the “objective” oeuvre of the artist, which combines its picturesque past and the three-dimensional future.

The story of the cot within art history is not new: Irina Nakhova, Diana Machulina – these are just some of the names of Russian artists who have recently dealt with this ready-made object, with an echo of the Soviet era detained in the post-Soviet apartments. Lungin has not bypassed attention to this kind of furniture as well. He caught its secret desire to be painted and transformed into an art object. Not very convenient for placing within the domestic space and not very comfortable for sleep, it seems that the cot was designed specifically for drawing: the tarpaulin canvas is already perfectly stretched, and asks to paint it.

Lungin’s “cot” painting translates the somnambulistic landscapes of the urban residential districts. At the peak of rationality, the artist lets the external (that is the urban landscape) live on the cot, swapping their normal position relatively to each other. It is like interchanging the functions of, for example, the floor and the ceiling, or constructing an apple orchard with a raging stream in the room on the seventh floor.

The painting on the cot is made with artist’s ironic sincerity. He resorts to the primitive and rough manner with a deliberately barbaric immediacy, to strengthen the emotional atmosphere of the urban area. Lungin cuts the already finished painting like Lucio Fontana cuts his canvases. Is it an imitation of the ragged cot-from-the-garbage, or an ironic break through the object, filled with the "embroidered with the white threads" allusions? Like Van Gogh from the Moscow’s sleeping quarter, who settled down in the absurd for him space and started depicting the alien landscapes instead of views of Saint-Remy, Lungin classifies the cot as something cheap and popularly iconological, as "fairground primitivism" or the "medieval illustration.”

Olga Turchina