Any art is always a dialogue, a conversation. The next problem is that there should be a very wide range of people who are interested in this conversation, and this circle is divided into, conditionally speaking, professionals, amateurs and amateurs. There are professionals in music: they’ve finished the conservatory, they’re playing notes on the sheet, they’re remembering the incredible amounts of the music text. There’s a circle of amateurs, and it’s a very wide circle. In the 19th century, he was made up of people who could perform rather complex works; they didn’t perform, they didn’t finish the conservatory, but they played, they read notes, they understood music, they knew composers, and so on. And the former for the latter and the latter for the former were clear. Then there are amateurs: they are those who no longer play, but they love music, go to the conservatory, listen, distinguish Beethoven from Mozart, and so on — but there are other people who just sometimes listen to music. The more people who just listen to music, the more amateurs, the more professionals. And the more professionals, the better the music gets.

Same thing with art. There are times when art gets deep into society, paintings adorn both the homes of the poor and the houses of the rich. The exhibitions have a huge social impact, critics describe and influence the art process, and art has a serious impact on the life of the society. It’s no accident that Mayakovsky wrote: «I want a feather levelled to the bayonet. It is not by chance that poets, writers, and artists in many lands have sometimes been responsible for their writing. Now’s another time. Modern art has become a form of design.

Art consists of form and content. The bigger the shapes, the smaller the content, and vice versa. In this world, nothing is 100%, so let’s say if the shapes are 99%, we have music or abstract painting, if the content is 99%, we’re dealing with literary text. Usually, the ratio is softer; there’s what’s called a picture music, there’s an illustrated text, there’s a comic book, and there’s a picture with a signature. In fact, most paintings have a name that is often simply descriptive, not necessary to understand the painting. But there are times when the name becomes an integral part of the work. And it’s not just about posters and cartoons. In any case, images can be more or less narcissistic, as is now customary, narrational.

Communicating involves the development of the subject, the movement. When there’s movement, there’s the interaction of characters, which means the story. But what happens here is that if we take a film or a book, it can go on for as long as it takes — within known limits, of course. And if we take a fixed picture, there’s only one action in it. The duration of this action is limited to a moment. I mean, the painting represents a static movement.

In my time, I was thinking that in classical visual art there are quite a limited set of topics. More often, artists used the same stories, practicing their reading options and focusing on performance skills. I became interested in drawing something that no one had ever painted before, the subject became my main theme, and at some point I added to the picture, the title, in quotes, because the written text often became a key element in understanding the drawing. I can’t say that there’s something in that row that’s coming out-- signing images have existed since ancient times, but in today’s graph, it wasn’t common.

So at some point (summer 1982), I started drawing pictures of signatures showing certain situations, stories, preferably never told by anyone before. In these stories, the background disappeared most often, and the sketched characters found themselves in a void filled with text messages.

In fact, a person thinks about things all the time and spends very little time without thinking. We keep describing the world with words. At the same time, the visual arts, in principle, imply the silence of characters; a silent film was invented several thousand years ago. The frescoes, the sculptures, the paintings, the paintings, the monumental silence. And it’s only in folk pictures, from ancient Greek vasograms to Russian meadows, that you and I have three slutty idiots.

So I got myself a style that on the above-mentioned scale fluctuates somewhere in the middle, between shape and content. Sometimes there are more than one, sometimes the other, but even in the case of abstract drawings, which I sometimes get punctured, the content is visible, and even abstraction is not possible without names. I don’t think the drawing is finished without a name at all. Well, since letters love numbers, I almost always set a date as well.

Although, of course, without projects, it wasn’t possible to call it a pre-selected topic for a certain series of works. I had several such projects: drawings on Greek vases, drawings on the subject of cyto-micenian seals, illustrations of the Cone-Gorbunku, drawings on the subject of the Greek vases, a large series of works by Labyrinth or the history of Minotaur. More often, I go out on a free hunt and see images that visit me at my discretion.

What used to be — a name or a picture? — I was often asked that question. Strangely, it used to be both. Chicken and egg showed up at the same time. It’s like in a dream where we kind of see (sometimes very detailed) images, hear sounds, talk ourselves (sometimes in different languages), something happens to us — and we sleep in our place and dream in which words flow into images and vice versa. It’s no accident, in the interpretation of dreams, to see shoes — to have care. The word turns into an image, but it implies a word.

In fact, all we see is the sense of what we exist in, and what we can’t go anywhere is consciousness. It exists in different forms: the so-called Realities of our daily existence, the Dreams, where we turn out at night, the Dreams that we draw ourselves, the Developments that bring in the music, the Memories that we fill with the void — and all that, in fact, is the same. This is very well shown in my favorite film, «Eight and A Half», by Federico Fellini.