When Dostoyevsky said “Beauty will save the world,” I don’t think he meant that paintings and sculptures will redeem us. For Dostoevsky, “beauty” transcends aesthetics, and it is what inspires the best in us. It makes us dream for goodness and truth, and it connects us to each other.

But humanity seems destined to descend into corruption, divisive ideologies, and war. Inevitably the world convulses with the chaotic spasms of history. Humanity’s folly generates endless chaos and trauma.

And yet, Art is a ray of hope preserving the integrity, sensitivity and the love of beauty in every human soul. Culture has the potential of uplifting and inspiring through human creativity. Hopefully, It was a way to establish a space were the self was able to stave of disintegration.

My painting is both immediate choreographed – a dance between the objective and subjective. Seizing the moment, he mind, the eye and the hand, submits to an intuitive flow that expresses a painting. It is an act of subjective freedom. The smaller drawings are a more intimate aspect of this subjective flow. The geometric paintings are more controlled, but equally subjective. The geometric work is more physical. These painting are more of a reaction to the physical world, an argument with its absolute imposition. These paintings tend to have a more physical presence in a sculptural sense.

There is a pop art aspect in the singularity of gesture. The animals depicted are generic, iconic, and objectified. These animals are representatives of the natural world. They stand in for my anxiety over our civilizational fissure with the natural world. I believe these small works are an echo of a deep nostalgia for a deeper, more organic connection to the natural world, the type of connection felt by our ancestors.

There are some things about my art that I am sure of. I am sure that I have succeeded in preserving my original commitment in preserving my personal existential, aesthetic, and moral assertion through the art.

Historical context: My parent’s origins were of a long line of Russian aristocrats. Pampered on large estates they indulged all manner of culture, music, art, literature, etc. Having read my grandfather’s memoir, a strong love and communion with the natural world was the currency of their daily life for many generations. But the Russian revolution put end to this idyllic life and ushered them into the brutal side of life. These families were forced into exile. Their youth was scarred by forced migration, World War 2 in, finally arriving to America in the 50’s. I was their second born. At times I feel that my art is an attempt to repair this shattered vessel of beauty. To repair the road to heaven, and away from the hell of war, despair ideologically motivated cruelty.

In the new world in which I was born (USA, NYC) I found the magic of freedom. The explosive creativity of the Pop scene, the art scene of the 80’s and 90’s, was liberty in action. I was emerging out of the cultural ruble into which I was born, and into tremendous inspiration in the atmosphere of freedom. My subjectivity became the center of my world.