Christ Reenters the Desert in Plutenko’s Painting
The closest place to a desert I remember visiting is Jockey’s Ridge in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. If you stand in the middle, enormous dunes stretch on every side and you imagine being on a caravan in the Sahara or with Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine.
At least, until you climb the ridge and see gift shops in the distance. In America, wilderness excursions are often packaged into national parks made for vacation time and Instagram posts. But I have driven through places that truly felt “deserted” — industrial districts full of empty factories where shards of glass cling to window frames, crass graffiti covers billboard advertisements, and houses are now miles from a grocery store or a garden. It’s like when a soldier wanders through a bombed-out town in a war movie. It’s this kind of wasteland that Stanislav Plutenko wants to evoke in “Christ in the Desert.”
The painting is a surrealist retelling of the story of Christ in the wilderness from Matthew 4. In Christian tradition, going into the wilderness is a time of spiritual cleansing and prayer. The desert is the unpackageable expanse of night skies unclouded by pollution, the silence of life away from distraction, but full of expectancy that God’s voice may speak at any moment.
Satan tempted Christ three times in the desert: he told Him to ease hunger by turning stone into bread, to test God by throwing Himself from the Temple, and to worship him in exchange for power over all the kingdoms of the world. Christ refused the temptations to chase material comfort, to presume on God’s mercy, and to exchange virtue for political aspirations.
Plutenko paints Christ amidst demolished buildings with skyscrapers strung on the horizon. The desert is the wreckage of Babel — a humanist civilization characterized by materialism, arrogance, and power. Christ sits amid urban decay. It’s not the peaceful silence of the mountains, nor the vast silence following a prayer God hasn’t yet answered — it’s the silence of a society that raised enough noise to drown God out, took what they wanted, and left.
Christ gazes at dollar bills, a broken clock, and an old book in the rubble. The dusty dollars symbolize materialism — when people chase wealth instead of virtue. The clock symbolizes humanity’s attempt to manipulate the time we have no ultimate control over. These are relics of consumerism — time sliced and diced into a work week, paper money devoid of value as soon as the bank falls, and the tattered pages of self-help savviness and business sense that was wise enough to build the city but not to save it.
The skyscrapers in the background echo the third temptation — unlimited political power. But kingdoms always fall into ruin. A red glow to the left hints that judgment is near. Plutenko said,
“This painting is how I see the second coming of Christ . . .War and urbanizations have ravaged the land, physically and spiritually. Who should be saved?”
When the bulldozers stop running, the clocks stop ticking, and the machines stop whirring, Christ comes to sit in the aftermath. The modern world embraced each temptation He refused. Plutenko’s painting captures the quiet sadness of a civilization that learned too late that the devil’s promises were empty.
