Boris Kocheishvili is an artist whose body and soul belong to his studio. Nevertheless, his universe that takes up this space of a few hundred square feet is genuinely infinite. You feel it at the very first meeting with the master even before you come to see his art.

As an 18-year-old boy, he was chasing an owl around a field, thinking of the bird as his grandmother's shabby, moth-eaten muff. The would-be painter was sure he would catch his prey, but the owl muff never let him near it. This uncaptured mythical bird will later settle in Kocheishvili's art, reminding him of itself from time to time. The artist's stories lead smoothly into the space of his works.

Boris Kocheishvili visualizes the intentions of his inner world in a movement around graphics, painting, and relief, establishing their connection to each other and to laconic verses that add another dimension to his visual creations.

In his development from graphics to relief, Kocheishvili has to some extent, though not directly, followed the academic curriculum: "The path from a graphic image to a real volume was considered the only right way to give the student a true understanding of the special features of sculpture, its creative techniques, language, and artistic form."¹ Note that he never took any courses in sculpture as such. He developed a taste for this art in the 1960s after he met Adelaida Pologova, one of the most brilliant sculptors among the Sixtiers. Kocheishvili spent a lot of time at her country house near the Oka. Inspired by his friend's talent, the young artist wanted to try his hand at sculpture, and Mrs. Pologova suggested he work on reliefs. It was a period of creative discoveries and quiet personal bliss. In his comment on "A Raft," a relief with two lovers, Kocheishvili said that "people sailing on the Oka are always happy," adding that "happiness is sailing to the Lethe with the woman you love." The women he invented boldly inhabit the spaces of his works to carry on a silent conversation. They may appear as three graces or transform into Chekhov's three sisters. The latter metamorphosis is not accidental, for the artist is very fond of theatre.

Kocheishvili's imagery conveys transient impressions that correlate with metaphoric reflections on the eternal, so his works look chamber and monumental at the same time. Kocheishvili's bas-reliefs manage to create a feeling of deep spaces, probably because the background (a forest, a river, or a glade)in the woods) is always two-dimensional, while relief as such is used only to represent "actors," i.e., people and objects.

While Kocheishvili's works seldom have a plot, they are still worlds apart from abstract art. As the author himself comments, "since the times of cave paintings, visual art has constantly been fluctuating from baroque forms to classical ones... and back... The struggle between these two apparently contrasting styles is what I see around me and feel inside myself."² Indeed, the two principles that the artist refers to, i.e., constructive composition and emotional content, are inseparably present in his images.

Kocheishvili maintains a connection with tradition in his understanding of relief and the principles of its construction but interprets it in his own sophisticated way. His perfectly balanced scenes are populated by characters that "arrive" from various temporal contexts: lecterns, baroque architectural details, flowers, garden vases, chalices, samovars, forks, and much more. Articles from this list (that could go on for a long time) may interact in pretty bizarre ways that defy common sense but follow the author's proprietary logic. Perhaps this is one of the secrets of his unique style. In this multidimensional optics, the background loses its traditional function and deals with the organization of space.

"Any spoken language begins with the formation of roots or those basic sounds used by primitive humans to convey their impressions from objects or natural phenomena. The emerging concepts were plastically described by words that played the role of precise and apt epithets."³ It is no coincidence that the artist uses the word "plastically" in his description of the birth of spoken language. The language of art that converts visual impressions to plastic images derives from an equally complex evolution. The "roots" and "sounds" in Kocheishvili's artistic language, that is, his themes, techniques, and colors, are relatively constant. Still, they add up to a distinct manner where the sculptural relief becomes this "apt epithet."

Kocheishvili's works may be regarded as intellectual puzzles whose decoding calls for a wealth of knowledge. His imagery includes a limited number of patterns. However, in the author's interpretation, these are just "shells" that acquire new meaning each time, depending on how the artist arranges them. The spatial components (a forest, a river, a clearing in the woods, or the sky) are timeless metaphors attracting the viewer's eye due to their position in the picture.

Much like in various traditional cultures, these spaces designate the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, where life meets death and the flow of time may change direction, collapse or bifurcate. Kocheishvili's symbolic landscapes belong to mythical worlds where he places people and objects. Everything in this aesthetics is notional - the characters themselves, the way they are depicted, and even the very idea of putting them into a fictional habitat. Nevertheless, the author's imagination successfully merges all these parts into one whole. All the elements of the composition correlate naturally and create an illusion that the relief was modeled after a live scene.

Color is essential to Kocheishvili's reliefs, which is rather uncommon in sculpture. His painting experience is not the only reason for that: to reach a harmony of volume and color is a fundamental challenge for any artist. Adelaida Pologova, his mentor, could deal with it brilliantly, and Kocheishvili learned a lot from this eminent master: he has a fine sense of color and takes full advantage of its powerful effects.

Kocheishvili's reliefs employ a limited range of colors. The "universal" white and gold occasionally cover the entire surface; this emphasizes the graphics of geometric structures and the tactility of sculpting. Pure colors in these works signify the purity of white plaster and golden bronze⁴ . The other group consists of reliefs where the color scheme includes several pastel shades of beige, pale green, gray, and pink. Note that in the 1990s, the artist used more aggressive colors, but they have softened over time, becoming less prominent and more complex.

Kocheishvili once wrote a short poem:  Do leave me alone  To set me in motion that would be  Sort of incredible

Profound inward peace underlies everything Boris Kocheishvili does. Experts on his art speak of "conspicuous humility" as the core of his esthetics. And "motion" in this context means the deeply hidden creative energy of the author that allows countless artistic interpretations of eternal themes.