We are learning, hoping and looking
for the right move, the right place,
the right partner. This ironic dance was beautifully shown in various cycles
of The Dance of Death during the upheavals of Renaissance. Holbein's Totentanz is a great example of it,
as are Fellini's cinematic visions, suspended between reality and dreams. Our time isn't very different from theirs.

Réalité Magique is a dance of life, human and not only, in a dance
of time.

Réalité Magique is a work of a lifetime. I was always captivated by the way people behaved and described it in my pictures and stories. These got me into trouble first with Soviet and later with American sensibilities. Some things are constant - they still do. After recent drastic changes in world politics and economy, as well
as in my own life, my vision became much more clear.

Human beings are different everywhere but their human nature is the same - an alive, constantly varied dance. We come close and pull apart. Side by side or stepping on each other, poor and rich, young and old, men and women twist and turn, leap and slide to have, to succeed, to love.

Réalité Magique is our time.
It is a time just after the death of old ideologies, a time when new ones
are still unclear, still being born.
Who knows what they will bring? Materialism has passed but the time of legend and tradition that ruled before Enlightenment hasn't returned yet. Will it make a comeback?

The world is poised in expectation
of new truths, new leaders and new styles. It's a magic time, without
a defined look or identity in Politics and in Art, a fascinating time of mixing of old and new, real and imagined, of life and death. My teachers: Apuleius, Holbein, Bruegel, Hoffmann, Gogol, Bulgakov and Fellini lived in similar times and illustrated them.

Réalité Magique is Western society seen through the eyes of one man during a period of two decades
in five cities.

Réalité Magique is a vision of the world expressed in paintings, drawings and prints, composed of different series. Occidental Scenes and Fundango are about social sides of life, whereas Duality and His and Hers show its spiritual, metaphysical aspects. The works were created in New York, Paris, Rome, Miami Beach and Berlin - from 1990 until today.