From the series "At the Café"

In every good café, sound weaves into fabric—not music, not separate conversations, but an even ambient hum in which one can hide better than in any silence. A person sitting alone at a table by the wall most often hasn't come to think. They haven't come for conversation, but for the presence of others—quiet, undemanding.

I painted the café I've been visiting for many years precisely for this. Here there's low light, dark paneling, elderly waiters who know all their regulars by name, and that very hum composed of others' words, the clinking of spoons, chairs being pushed back. In this noise there's its own acoustics of solitude: nearby someone argues, someone laughs, someone stays silent—and it becomes easier, as if you're sharing something common without discussing anything with anyone. The teapot and two cups on the front table were left by someone who just got up—but the hum hasn't shifted, it holds the entire scene.

Hence the technique—maximally raw, wet-on-wet, almost without sharp boundaries. I deliberately blurred the figures: the woman at the nearest table, a couple a bit further off, silhouettes in the depth, a server on the right—they all exist in one atmospheric mass, and no one is singled out. Colored flashes are minimal: ochre tabletops, a yellowish teapot, a ginger bun of hair, the gleam of a glass. This manner is akin to the Intimists—Bonnard, Vuillard—for whom public space was always an extension of the personal. The viewer looks at the scene not as a witness, but as another visitor: somewhat detached, somewhat involved.

Sometimes the loneliest place in the city isn't an empty room. It's a table in the corner of a crowded café.