My very first solo exhibition, in 1985 at the Leningrad Union of Artists, presented a cycle of Russian landscapes - the result of several years travelling through the vast expanses of my native country. My two most recent solo exhibitions in 2008 - one at the Centre Culturel Français in Milan, the other at the Chapelle Sainte-Anne in Arles - were devoted to religious painting and bull-fighting respectively. Landscapes, religious painting, bull-fighting scenes: three themes that I hold dear, and which provide an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Three themes which have, of course, evolved over the years; three themes providing the central focus for this exhibition at the Catto Gallery - which also happens to be the thirtieth solo exhibition of an artist who will in June 2008 celebrate his 55th birthday.

My first canvas painted in Paris, in 1988, used a somewhat Cubist style and fresh colours to depict the White Angel of Notre-Dame sounding the Trumpet surrounded by the pensive or troubling Chimeras who gaze down upon Paris and its inhabitants. Here they are again, twenty years later, in a new composition dominated by the colour yellow, of which I have been especially fond since 1997. They watch over a room devoted to Paris with my familiar, broad panoramas of the Seine but also, for the first time - paradoxically, perhaps, for an 'old' Montmartrois such as myself - a series of canvases of the Butte Montmartre, paying tribute at long last to this Republic of Artists from all over the world, which honoured me with the title of 'ambassador' on 6 June 2008, and which I consider quite simply as 'my' home village.  

The Last Supper , to which I devoted all my energies in 2007, is the latest wing of a religious inspiration which first manifested itself during my studies at the St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, but which found its fullest expression only after my move to the West, and above all through my work for St Paul's Cathedral in London. Together with The Redemption (another monumental composition which brings to a close a meditation begun in 2006 with The Argonauts ), The Last Supper accompanies a series of graphic works in which I pursue my reflections on the New Testament, reflections explored in greater detail in the third monograph on my work, dedicated to my religious paintings, and presented during this exhibition.

This 'overview-exhibition' cannot truly be called a retrospective, since all the works shown were painted in 2007 and 2008; there is, however, one canvas which I have re-worked every year since 1992 and which finally achieved its definitive form in 2008, after returning from my latest trip to the Feria in Arles: Torero . Painted using my characteristic technique of encaustic (wax-based) paint mixed with oil, and related to a parallel series of graphic works, it witnesses my passion for bull-fighting, a favourite theme that has enriched my work - along with the Venice Carnival - during my twenty years' contact with Western culture.     

And what of Russia, you will ask? Have I betrayed my native country to embrace Western Latin culture - Paris, Venice, Arles? Of course not. My drawings for Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The White Guard , commissioned in 2006 by the St Petersburg publisher Vita Nova and shown here in the form of lithographs, clearly reflect - it seems to me - my real attachment to my Slavic roots, and my enduring passion for Russia which remains, even in Paris, the principal, living, constantly-renewed source of my art

Recently, on 15 May 2008, Muscovites were able to discover my work on The White Guard at the city's Mikhail Bulgakov Museum, the author's apartment where Bulgakov actually wrote The White Guard , and which was also the setting for the action of his famous novel The Master and Margarita , a masterpiece of Russian literature which has never ceased to inspire me, and which I will soon have the honour and pleasure of illustrating here in my Montmartre studio.'    

                                                 Sergei Chepik, Montmartre, May 2008