For Constantine Cherkas the most vital element in the art of painting is color - and his unabashed mixtures of red, orange, yellow and blue are what strikes us in his landscapes and portraits, still lives and interiors.

A decade's worth of studies at the three academies of fine arts at Moscow, Munich and Vienna and rigorous apprenticeships also gave Cherkas a fine appreciation of form and texture as his early sketches demonstrate so well. In particular, his portraits pay homage to Cezanne in their careful observation of plane and facet, tone and construction, a legacy that Cherkas encountered from his lessons with many of Russia's great painters. In this way, Cherkas maintains a direct line with the stellar members of Russia's cultural rebirth when artists undermined the canons of 19th century narrative painting by emphasizing the right to experiment with the intrinsic components of the painting, unbeholden to the imposition of didactic political and moral behests.

What also preoccupies Cherkas is composition rather than construction, plane rather than volume, and he apprehends the reality of phenomena precisely as a vast color field. While acknowledging the importunency of material things Cherkas uses objects and figures primarily as bearers of emphatic colors, undisturbed by local shade and shadow. Consequently, in reshaping our world according to his own dictates, Cherkas reminds us of its physical substance of its aerial spectrum and spectral air, of its sensuous origin and tactile beauty. The visual response, however, is both a confirmation of our environment and the displacement of our conventional reception of it, a double result that is both gratifying and unsettling.

Dr. John E. Bowlt, May 1999.

- Founder and Director, The Institute of Modern Russian Culture
- Professor, University of Southern California
- Art expert, author, and curator of international exhibitions