Ground securely by his systematic academic background, the artist was enabled to work in differing, artistic genres. Dmitry Yakovin's early productions' diversity impress the viewer with their zest, indications of future creativity, and the great proficiency demonstrated by the artist. His early period - if one call a time such for a person now only thirty-three - watercolors, drawings, paintings - meet the highest standards of the traditional style in his homage to it and consequently may be evaluated as completely professional. But no true artist can be considered a real master unless he attempts to make his creations express his own individual vision. It is here that the artist begins to struggle to address the most important issues in his own unique individual style and to be heard about them. Dmitry Yakovin moves here from representational realism into his own aesthetically conceived world of fantastic-realism.

Unpredictable characters, which appear on his canvases in each painting, stimulate the spectator to confront paradoxical phantasmagoric (whimsical) reality. The subjects take on their own life and wander in and out of the paintings.

They sometimes remind us of life's fragile transience by their recognizable forms and human faces yet often invoking smiles of incomplete comprehension as when one sees a philosophically passive elephant flying. . . The unity of style demands the constitutive force of an inner artistic sensibility expressed in the search for new color and compositional embodiments. Reincarnation's eternality penetrates with such force that it transforms Dmitry Yakovin's new world of illusions into an immersion (for both artist and spectator) in the controversial paths of the surrealistic vanguard.

Defined by Andre Breton in "the Surrealism Manifesto" (1924) as "pure psychic automatism, by which one intends to express verbally, in writing, or by any other method the real functioning of the mind: Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercises by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." Following this definition, the distinction between cause and effect as well as the requirement or temporal continuity need not be present in newly created art works.

The audience will experience instead just the mutual interpretation of world's juxtaposed one to the other. After an analysis of Dmitry Yakovin's painting that fits into the rubric of surrealistic expression, one can conclude that even after the complex process of psychological refraction, they attract the audiences' eyes as if by magical power.

Svetlana Vais
New York Correspondent