"Counterpoint," the Louvre's current show of Russian contemporary art, is subtitled "Russian Contemporary Art: From Icons to the Avant-Garde, By Way of the Museum." However, a visit to the show reveals very little that is iconic or even especially avant-garde, at least when it comes to the visual aspects of the art itself.

Upon approaching the museum, the visitor first sees, on the museum's outer walls, Alexei Kallima's fake billboard "Veuillez Nous Excuser, pour des Raisons Techniques l’Exposition est Repoussée" ("We Apologize, for Technical Reasons the Exhibition is Postponed"). Inspired by the iconography of Socialist Realism, the painting depicts workers painting walls in preparation for an exhibition. After the recent controversy surrounding Avdei Ter-Oganyan's anti-Putin art, the work's humor seems even more barbed, though it fails to transgress in a genuinely interesting way.

The same can be said of Vadim Zakharov's "The End, Confession of a Contemporary Artist." This video installation presents a performance in which the artist wears a red crest on his head and reads a long text dedicated to a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars in Russia in 1812, accompanied by images of fire projected onto the Louvre's walls. It's a terrific and personal installation that clearly fits into contemporary video art as practiced by Bill Viola and others. Nor can anything really new be found in Yuri Albert's "Excursion with Blindfolded Eyes," a video of a group of blindfolded people visiting Moscow's Tretlakov Gallery that the artist made while blindfolded himself.

In the same room, "Le Louvre," Valery Koshiyakov's huge fresco on cardboard, has been placed directly onto the floor and reveals a combination of influences, ranging from Arte Povera to Thomas Hirschhorn to Gerhard Richter. The installation by Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina — pairs of shoes arranged in front of the neon letters "ZAY" — is reminiscent of the work of Christian Boltanski and Bruce Nauman.

In the next part of the exhibition, however, abstract paintings that reference 20th-century Russian art bring the concept of icons into play, and some also provide interesting reinterpretations of past works of the Russian avant-garde. Pavel Pepperstein's "From Mordor with Love" series refers both to Art Nouveau aesthetics and Kasimir Malevitch. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid approach Russian history in a fun, provocative way in a pair of paintings: the first, an idyllic scene, is titled "Russia's Most Wanted Painting," and the second, a geometrical abstraction, bears the title "Russia's Most Unwanted Painting." Also on view are the four abstract paintings by Avdei Ter-Oganyan that were previously banned by the Russian minister of culture for a violently anti-Putin caption. While they certainly push the envelope, the works don't seem to justify the hype.

A real avant-garde sensibility appears, however, in "Vertical Opera," by the Russian-born, American-based couple Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. For some time now the two artists have been investigating architectural utopias, and their delicate models are uniquely their own.