Pyotr Belenok was a sculptor by training and began painting in the late 1960s, around the same time he moved from Kiev to Moscow. In the 1970s and 1980s he often took part in group exhibitions of artists of Moscow neo-formal art.
The artist ironically called his distinctive pictorial system "panic realism", combining abstract expressionism and hyperrealism. The same obsessive subject passes from painting to painting: men (women - rarely) against the background of an impending catastrophe on a planetary scale. The world of apocalypse surrounding people is always abstract: swift black and white broad strokes, flashes and whirlwinds, giving birth to frightening "invasions". But people are always realistic: Belenok found the heroes of his future disasters in sports magazines, cut them out, glued them on a base and covered them with paints.