A new series of artworks by Sergey Frolakov is set to be unveiled later in the year, with the intriguing title “Phantoms of St. Petersburg”. This collection will include oil and water-colour paintings, drawings, and varnished miniatures.
     St. Petersburg’s history spans several distinct historical epochs. Many dramatic events, historic people, and ominous or mysterious figures have left behind a trace of themselves in the very fabric of the city. Their occurrence and disappearance, and the myriad strange facts about their existence are reflected in St. Petersburg’s folklore. The events which have generated conjecture, city hearings, jokes and fables have generated phantom images which grew into the crude walls of city houses; they became something like ghosts living in the back streets and nooks of old St. Petersburg.
     Lieutenant Kizhe, the Nose of major Kovalev, crazy city official Poprishin, the half dead mummy of Prokharchin and other chimeras of the city’s folklore are a part of St. Petersburg in the same way that they are part of the literary works of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Dal and other writers. These surreal characters also provide a basis for the allegorical paintings of Sergey Frolakov.
     In the artist’s opinion, the chimerical paradox of St. Petersburg life exists in the combination of incongruous circumstances. The imperial grandeur of the city center, against the bulk of office buildings, and a darkly mysterious air. Bureaucracy is important, almost to the point of absurdity. In the suites of smart halls and majestic cabinets you can almost hear the tread of the “His Majesty Document”. In this world it seems that a document becomes something more than a sheet of paper; it becomes an entity of its own choosing, walking down Nevsky Prospect amongst the strolling or hurrying characters of some surreal performance.
     Faces made of porcelain, pasteboard carriages... A strange creature dressed as a government official appears from a pillar pasted with posters, and dissolves in fresh morning air near the Admiralty. Against a background of pseudo-European scenery the most incredible and fantastic plots develop. The image of “Petrograd’s skipjacks” (groups of robbers in Petrograd from 1918-1920) dressed in funeral shrouds with tram springs attached to their feet portrays the mystic and apocalyptic mood of Petrograd’s residents while the city was immersed in the nightmare of the revolution.
     The city with European facades has a phantasmagoric “inside”, where logic and common sense no longer exist, and the abyss of untimeliness comes to light. The artist came to such conclusions after he explored St. Petersburg’s historical areas, looked at its yards and stairs, small lanes and hidden alcoves, while trying to solve the riddle of St. Petersburg’s modernist style. This is what inspired Sergey Frolakov to create the deeply figurative portraits of the city’s face, such as we see in the paintings and drawings of post-war Warsaw by Bronislav Linke. The exhibition “Phantoms of St. Petersburg” is scheduled to open in autumn, 2007. There, everybody will have a chance to dip into the surreal worlds presented by the artist.