Andrei Pokrovskii's paintings are built as stages. The figures in them are part person and part fixture, held up by the room they stand in. In the seven works of A fertile soil is full of dung, a train coach, a courtyard, a tiled hall and a bedroom are the subject, and the people within them are the means by which those places show their condition.

Pokrovskii describes the series as concerned with an incompatibility with space: a passage through a toxic and rotten environment, and the search for a way out of it.¹ He also finds in that hostility a potential for growth, something hidden in the journey that can only unfold once the traveller has been faced with it. This is the fertile soil of the title. The paintings keep to the condition itself. Panelled corridors carry the marks of wear, arched openings close off long perspectives, and polished floors run toward doors that stay shut. He prepares his own panels and treats the painting as an object, and he has said he would like it to be seen as one.²

The Green Door is the series' reassurance. Its title comes from H. G. Wells's story "The Door in the Wall", in which a man finds a way into another world and then cannot find the door again.³ Pokrovskii has known the story for a long time and is drawn to the idea that the entrance can be anywhere. A figure stands at the edge of a courtyard, and the green door sits at the edge of the picture. He says a way towards a new realm can be found, perhaps more cleanly than Wells's protagonist managed. He is clear there are no guarantees, and what lies beyond is kept as an intimate secret. The scene is frozen on the threshold.¹

Just A Vehicle places its figures in a train coach, moving towards or away from the dark world that is the stage for the whole series. The passengers are changing into something fish-like and corpse-like, and the change goes further as the train nears its destination. Pokrovskii points to the wheeled feet and the road-light eyes, details of machinery rather than of life. The figures are not really characters, he says. They are closer to dolls or statues, extensions of the environment, present to show its qualities or to serve as an entry point. In his words, they are "just a vehicle to get into the painting's world."⁴

This is the most useful way into the series. The figures carry no narrative, and the viewer is not asked to read their faces. Their presence is the instrument by which the place is measured. The painter's attention goes to structure: the panelling, the threshold, the arch, and the hard edges of a corridor that leads somewhere the picture will not show.

Earlier pictures set figures in the same way. In Schlemmer's Group at Table of 1923, a woman seen from behind, in a blue dress, sits at the end of a white table, while a seated figure and a standing one remain at the edges. The people are placed as parts of a geometry, and the geometry is the subject.⁵ Rothko's Subway of 1939 makes the same move in a smaller key. A man stands reading a newspaper, a thin figure leans against the wall beside a dark curtain, and a small figure waits in a bright opening at the top. The space between them carries more weight than any of them.⁶ The Osservanza Master's Saint Anthony Leaving His Monastery, painted between 1430 and 1435, offers the oldest model. Two monks stand in the doorway of a pale green building, while the saint, with a staff and a halo, waits at a wooden door on the right, under a red roof and a row of cypresses against a gold ground. The threshold is the subject, as it is in The Green Door.⁷ Pokrovskii's interest in the door as a site of decision, rather than a passage, sits within this lineage. His figures are closer to Schlemmer's than to the saint's devotion.

The list of references Pokrovskii presents for the show widens the frame. It includes Kafka's The Castle, a novel about a man who never gets into the place that governs his life,⁸ and Thief: The Dark Project, a 1998 video game in which the player moves through stone corridors lit only by what they carry.⁹ Neither is offered as a model for the paintings. Both share its condition: a way through that is closed, uncertain or badly lit.

The title makes the same point from the other side. Pokrovskii treats the hostile world as soil in which something can grow, but the growth is hidden, and it can only come to the traveler who has been faced with the unwelcome. The journey through the rot is therefore not simply a condition to endure. It is also where the new realm, or the primordial homeland of The Green Door, might be found.¹

The series ends on a threshold that does not open. In The Green Door the way exists and is not shown. In Just A Vehicle the figures are the way in, and they are already changing. “A fertile soil is full of dung” offers no rescue. It offers a frozen moment in which the door is still shut and the viewer stands beside it, looking in.