Boris Kocheishvili is a master of space and composition. How he manages to convey such incredible depth within the small confines of a sheet of paper remains a mystery even to the artist himself. It is no coincidence that one of his favorite words is the old Russian term "okoyom (horizon)" — a notion of the boundless expanses of the Russian landscape, impossible to traverse yet graspable with the eye.

The series of graphic sheets presented at the exhibition resembles a storyboard for an unwritten play, where characters perform their mise-en-scènes in one space and then another. From one sheet to the next, the plot, the cast of characters, and the landscape changed, yet the sense of a frozen frame, a continuous narrative line (as well as the artist’s distinctive text), remained unchanged. This sense of framing arose because the artist’s task in this graphic series was akin to that of a photojournalist or a director. The artist himself said that in these works, he was searching for a momentary plasticity—capturing a fleeting plastic moment, filling emptiness with meaning, and achieving a harmony of lines and shapes that construct a certain narrative.

The exhibition at the State Russian Museum showed recent works of Boris Kocheishvili. Paintings and reliefs, full of grotesque and subtle poetry, are recognizable at first glance and well remembered.

Boris Kocheishvili’s works are a kind of formula — capturing the essence of the human figure and its surrounding space, the rhythms, the pulsation of color and form within a schematically rendered landscape. Polina Lobachevskaya, the project’s curator, grasped a key theme of the motif of the shore, which runs like a red thread through the artist’s entire body of work. She strung her exhibition decisions onto this thread like beads, carefully shaping the presentation of Kocheishvili’s works. The sound, movement, and light introduced into the exhibition space by other artists in no way diminished the significance or beauty of Kocheishvili’s graphic, painterly, and relief works.