The New Moon (The Celkov Passion).

Material: bronze.

Height: 130 mm.

Length: 300 mm.

“An artist is something incomprehensible.

You have to be born with it.

It cannot be brought up!”

О. Tselkov

Sergei Falkin’s new bronze sculpture is a dedication to one of the brightest representatives of Soviet unofficial art – Oleg Tselkov.

He is a painter who during the difficult time for non-conformists caught impressions literally out of thin air and tried to comprehend life and art in the special manner he found: through bright expressive images of characteristic personages. These characters became moon-shaped, round “faces” with a flat face, often depicted so close-up that it seems they barely fit into the frame with which the canvas is bound. Tselkov’s main means of influence was color: the masks – faces on his works are almost always unchanged, but color, tone, shade determine whether the mask will be an attribute of tragedy, drama or comedy.

The character in the sculpture of Sergey Falkin is somewhat pensive, surprised, and just like the images from the artist’s paintings – laconic and impenetrable, but – less expressive. Like the faces on the painter’s canvases, the hero of the sculptural work is a generalized mask that combines both the people of the future and the archaic images of the past. Only in the bronze work this “man of the crowd” by Oleg Tselkov found a way out of the two-dimensional space of the painting, acquired volume, but lost that shimmering color and light. And at that moment the image of the “mug” enters into a dialogue with the viewer, because it is free of color characteristics, the mood in it each viewer will see his own.

Sergey Falkin’s work is not a discussion, but a kind of paraphrase, a conversation with the work of the Soviet artist, an attempt to comprehend it through sculpture and create a dialogue between both plastic incarnations of the character from the world of Oleg Tselkov’s paintings.