The urban landscapes by Nikolai Chiryatev were created in the basement of his workshop, just like the best examples of the genre. The unmistakable firewalls of St. Petersburg tenement houses filled with unnatural green light of street lanterns sink in the eerie purple flames of the night city.

The artist deliberately avoids using the rich literary canons of depicting the city, but the yellow walls of blind courtyards and alleys keep the smell of the "Petersburg Physiology", inhabited with “the poor folk” and the ghosts of petty officials. Taking off the Gogol's overcoat, and defending against the evil, the artist works in bright electric lights, trying to catch the effect of urban lighting after sunset. Naturalism and sentimental topography are not important in his landscapes, and the 5th line can be easily confused with the 25th. What we see is a kind of universal urban landscape where the season and the time of the day don’t need to be defined, where cars are hidden under thick layer of snow, where wall graffities look as the blackened frescoes.

Chiryatev continues the tradition of metaphysical landscape: he creates an atmosphere in tune with the spirit. Despite of the melancholic empty streets images, in real life he is a big lover of the sun and the solar aesthetics. While his city series is a statement about a man, his place in the world, and, what is more important, his feelings.

Admiring the variety of lighting effects and naturalistic colors, it is easy to lose sight of the painting structure. There are no characters and no actions, but the dialogue of light and darkness that can be regarded as a conflict of cosmic scale.

The electric light in Chiryatev’s works is the evidence of invisible presence of a man. Single windows in the mist or in miraculous snow glow look particularly dramatic. Emotional content is very important for the author. The creative impulse often comes from the attempt to convey the feeling of living in the dark, when a man loses himself in space, and plunges into a state similar to weightlessness, which very few people had the opportunity to experience.

This position of darkness observer explains the compositional unity of Chiryatev’s landscapes and archetypal images of bridges, crossroads, gates, that symbolize the transition state. Each painting by Nikolai Chiryatev can be called a window into another world. But not every viewer has the courage to peer into the darkness and meet with its inhabitants right there in the exhibition hall. This show is a certain spiritual feat of the young artist who tamed the poisonous light of street lamps, and made the haze retreat, leaving in front of us a pedestrian crossing, a staircase or a warm light of a bulb in somebody’s kitchen.