"JOYS"
Painting, graphic arts
In the gallery halls

Arthur Molev’s art…
It has always embodied the same loves: it takes life in avidly through the sponge of colour, it grants with bright paints all that is stormed on the canvas by the vivid tremblingly passionate brush.
Semi-tones and semi-feelings, patience and regularity, soft whispers – this is all not in his manner. 
His work possesses an easily recognizable voice – due to the nerve-strain and the genuine thick and hoarse manly timbre; however if you manage to hear some unexpectedly clear childish voices in it, you will surely not be mistaken. 
Not every Ivan-the-Fool can be able to hold in his hands the feather of the Fire-Bird, it doesn’t come so easy. What’s more, even if one has managed to catch it – it is sure to be a damn nuisance. I don’t know where and when precisely did Arthur catch his Fire-Bird; however, I can easily see not an open plain cupped with the black cupola of the blinking starry sky, but something quite opposite: rather a sudden and covert blaze illuming with its not-for-everybody light the top of the wall of a brick house somewhere in Petrogradskaya (one of the old city boroughs), enamouring the artist forever.
The feather from the Fire-Bird’s tail stings, and the hands burn, but the brush is just dancing over the canvas, it’s just flying over it.  In winter, winters being severe in Shkapina street (the Germans had good grounds to have recently shot those slums in a film about Berlin of 1945), the burning feather had even been sure to serve an applied service warming and softening the paints on his palette. The artist himself had never been against getting warmed up – so he used to ride his Humpback Horse (Ivan-the-Fool’s faithful steed and familiar) to the local pub. Once upon a time it happened that they pranced so vividly that almost burned the stairs of the artists’ house in Pushkinskaya 10: a sparkle flew away from under the hooves – and lo! one of the footsteps stands gilded ever since then. Everyone stepping on it is still sure to recall this story which had happened to Arthur. 
Those times are long past, now his pictures arrive by express service from Amsterdam. You just open the parcel and find other cities, each one being a treasure in itself – definitely not Petrogradskaya or Vasilievsky (another old borough of St. Petersburg), but still somehow similar and intimately cognate. How come? – it’s the feather stinging and burning through the skies the way it used to – just have a look and here it goes!