The entire scope of human activity may be seen as composed of various games:
political, military, economic, religious, and erotic. For me, painting is the single most enrapturing, intriguing and abstract of human games, realized by simple means that have been known from time immemorial, according to which everything depends on the qualifications ( the innate abilities ) of the player alone. People have been playing the game called “painting” for a long time. At times, its rules become more and more complex – to the point of the highest intellectualism. At other times, they have been simplified to the level of the primitive – a game that anyone can play.

I play an almost completely forgotten form of the game, in which the qualities of the surface of the canvas pose their own special value. I play slowly, taking pleasure in the game itself.

Discovery of the correct metaphor allows for the transformation of the events of life into artistic events. And then, quit possibly, imagination may outweigh reality on the scales of truth. Painting is like a game of chess in which your opponent is God, and there is no possibility of winning. Truly, you can never transform a painting into life itself. Nevertheless, you can play an interesting match. In essence, the history of art is a chronicle of these chess matches.

There are certain moods that with unchanging constancy evoke in us particular memories, forcing us again and again to experience inexplicably overwhelming, incomprehensible emotions, first felt in childhood. The lighted lantern in the summer garden at night, quiet conversations by its light, the sound of countless insects. The circling of moths around the lantern. The circling of couples to the sounds of that old tango on an illuminated dance-floor, lost somewhere in the night. The circling of a thick crowd of people on the Piazza del Popolo lit up by light from the lantern of the sun. A feeling of loneliness—but not of the tragic-autumnal variety, but rather of the light and sweetly moving sort—not your personal loneliness, but that of everyone living under this starry sky. And the sky itself, just like a multitude of distant lanterns, each with its quiet conversations.

There is a sorcery to simple things, the hidden meaning of which can suddenly be revealed to us in certain situations. A long table, covered with white linen, immediately after some sort of celebration. The intoxicating smell of extinguished candles lingers. The lamps above the table are still lit—there are twelve of them. In thought, you sketch in the thirteenth and the meaning of the scene abruptly changes. What was an ordinary scene has become “The Last Supper,” and the lamps have assumed a truly cosmic significance, taking the place of the apostles. In essence, they are perhaps even more precise representations than painted figures would be. Invention interweaves with reality, color passes into color, so that at times you can’t tell where the borders are. The goblets on the table turn into the basins of enormous fountains. The streams of water shining in the sun are like the splash of champagne when glasses ring together. And the entire painting becomes a banquet of water, a “Roman Feast” or perhaps a “Baptism.” This table is a stage, on which various plays take place, written by the coauthors of life and fantasy. “Feast of Kings” has just been completed and the tablecloth, stained with wine, or perhaps with blood, has been taken away. A new tablecloth, a new canvas, is ready for yet another play.

Your consciousness, captivated by the game, generates image after image. At this point, it’s no longer even important what elements you are manipulating in order to articulate a composition. Pumpkins, thrown down in a heap, with their profusion of forms and colors, fractured here and there, bruised, broken in halves, transform into a “Battle.” Then the logic of the game suggests the subject “Mourning,” and a pumpkin, carved in two with entrails exposed becomes the body of a slain soldier. There is a completely different energy to be found in watermelons (the series “High Summer”). It’s a merry, succulent energy, splattering beyond limits—that of an eternal summer, when anything is possible and every exaggeration is justified. Paint runs across the paper like the juice of the watermelon, flows down your hands and elbows, floods the tablecloth, floods the world with joyous energy.

The day is over. Clothing thrown on a chair retains something of the presence of its wearer, yet at the same time, it acquires its own, particular character and mood. At one moment it is proud and calm, at another happy and ironic, at yet another it helplessly slips from the chair after a long, hard day. Paintings set in a row appear as though they are conducting a leisurely conversation, appear as though they are looking at you out of the corners of their eyes, becoming observers, members of the jury, judges. You want to make them red, in order to magnify the effect. Then again, the logic of the game suggests that there should be twelve paintings, so that it will be possible to imagine them as the apostles, who have gathered for that same “Last Supper.” Then they will head out to wander the world, abandoning the studio, their forum—every work, like any other object, has its separate fate—before they will meet again some day in the halls of a museum.

I was born under the water sign in a city without water.

My first drawing was that of the sea. I drew a line that divided the page. No one could guess that it is water, but I knew. In my mind it was so wonderful and endless that I didn’t know how to show it on paper. Then I drew a river that I would swim in to get to the sea. Our city had a river, rather shallow and grimy, completely unlike Dnepr, but nevertheless rivers still flow to the sea. In the springtime I would make paper ships and set them off into resonant streams hoping that they would sail to the sea. I chose swimming as a sport. I swam in chlorinated water contending for seconds. I quit this sport after I understood that one should swim slowly, in clean, transparent water, enjoying the feeling of one’s body.

My heart became even more attracted to painting, for it is an element just like water. Over time I learned to communicate the qualities and feeling of water. At times it is cheerful like on a summer day in a fountain, other times – sad, like on a gray autumn day. Water can be shallow or deep, the color of turquoise or olive oil, rusty or crystal clear. Painting became my means of moving towards the sea, like the ship ”Argo” of Greek mythology, on which the Argonauts sailed to the Kolhida to find the Golden Fleece.

My first encounter with the Black Sea taught me to paint deep, transparent water, how to achieve the blinding shine of the smooth water surface on midday in summer. Then there was the Baltic Sea. I enjoyed painting the shallow murky-green water of the Riga harbor with its wavy, sandy bottom. Color flows into color, fantasy intertwines with reality, and at times you forget the limit. While making the imaginary journey with the help of colors and canvas, I didn’t even notice how I reached the Pacific Ocean, the shore of San Francisco – an enormous, gleaming world. Painting, my ship “Argo,” took me to the shores of the South Asian Sea. In Hong Kong, I brought mythology to life with a painting of Icarus.

Now I live by the Atlantic Ocean, in the craziest and most enthralling city in the world. Water has become my favorite hero, I have dedicated many paintings to New York and, over time, its meaning has transmuted – as have I. From an object of mood, water has turned into a keeper of myths and legends, has become a symbol of an unlimited and unruly power that is capable of changing the landscape and the destiny of people, sometimes removing civilizations from the face of the earth. While depicting water, one is swept into a captivating game, where the goal is illusory and the route is unclear, where only the process is real, and one’s life is only a journey of a paper ship through the ocean-sea; and if we don’t run into a large steel ship, if we don’t drown in the storm or get soaked in the rain, if there is no mutiny on the bounty, if……………….., then we will reach our destination!

Outside the window of my room in my grandmother’s house, where we stayed every summer when I was little, grew an apple tree. It was stunted and no apples grew on it. But every year on July 15, my birthday, I looked out of the window in the morning to find the tree covered with apple caramel candies in brightly colored wrappers. I don’t remember precisely at what age I understood that this was not actually a miracle, but rather an enchantment orchestrated for me by my parents. In order not to disappoint them I continued for years to pretend on my birthdays that I believed in the magic. Later, they realized that I knew their secret, but didn’t want to disappoint me by revealing that they guessed I guessed. This game continued a few more years, until it was no longer important who believed in what and who knew about it. What was important was the lesson of love that my parents had taught me, and my loving response to it. Then I grew up and the game came to an end. But on the apple tree real apples began to grow.

The age of geographical discovery ended long ago. The map of the world has been transformed beyond recognition many times over. States rise up and disappear and there is nothing surprising in their vanishing, for they were never in fact features of geography, but rather of political nomenclature. Now they can be found only in an historical atlas. Other states never really existed in the first place—they were born of myths and remain in memory as symbols or mirages, like El Dorado or Camelot.

Yet the states we can see—which take shape in the external world—these are far from all that there are, and far from the most important. There are other states that stake no claim on territory or maps, yet nevertheless lay over them like a sheet of Mylar. Transparent, with invisible and inconstant frontiers, their provinces accumulate one on top of another with no concern for border conflicts. They have their own languages, constitutions and high courts. They have their own allies and enemies, anthems, battles, victories and defeats.

These are the countries of our inner worlds—they are internal states, states of mind, but for each of us they are more real than any existing nation or federation. Such states may endure for as short a while as a single lifetime or for as long as an eternity. Simply invoke the charmed word “Homer,” and the restless bird of memory carries you off to the distant and obscure continent of the Iliad. You’re already equipping your fleet of paper boats to set sail and rediscover it.

Every country has its own methods of shaping life. The rules of the game in our “Country Of Two” are those of art. For us, the sun is nothing more than a red ball, thrown aloft at dawn and caught again at dusk (Playing With the Red Ball). Here, you can take the sky in your hands and wring it out to make rain (Praying for Rain). Paper boats can withstand a storm in which the horizon itself gives way and flaps like an old rag in the wind (Dangerous Journey, Broken Horizon). Here, one becomes satiated not by food, but by a feast of color and form (High Summer, Roman Feast). This is a place where gold and silicon can trade places on the scales of value, depending on the conceptions and inspiration of the creator. Here we travel light, carrying in our packs only the burden of memory.

In the end, these are all metaphors of a continuously changing world—a world that is more than just a collection of fixed meanings and constant structures—a world that is instead a ceaseless stream of transformation in which sense is less a presence than it is a potential. This is our world, our “Country of Two,” but the naturalization process is just a walk through the gallery.