Portrait of painter Vladimir Ovtchinnikov for Le Monde | Patrick Wack

‘In Russia, the old man who painted peace’. Patrick Wack's reportage with French journalist Benoit Vitkine was published in French daily Le Monde.

The story tells the journalists' moving encounter with Vladimir Ovtchinnikov, an 84-year-old painter and local celebrity, from Borovsk. More than 100 of his paintings adorn the houses and walls of the small town in Kaluga Oblast. His father having spent ten years in the gulag in the 1930s, his art often addressed repression in the USSR. He has now fearlessly taken his anti-war opinions and nostalgia of a Ukrainian-Russian brotherhood to the streets.