“Chechen female skydiving team” is a monumental canvas from the series of the same name. The athlete-girls are soaring under the white canopies in the sanguine orange sky depicted in a socialist realist spirit. This story represents a dreamy memory of the past times of political peace in the Chechen region, where the artist was born. Such mood is emphasized both by the selected theme – sport as a symbol of the political peace, and the style inherent to the official Soviet art, characterized by socially positive idyllic subjects.

Moreover, the creation of a monumental canvas using simply the charcoal and sanguine is a plastic challenge. The work demonstrates the consistent quality of the artist's work: for him, the questions of plastics coexist peacefully with the plot of the painting. Not once in his picturesque practice Kallima switched from figurative representation to the abstraction, emphasizing the importance of not only the depicted object but also how it was drawn. Thus, Kallima is one of the staunch fighters for the rights of the oldest medium in contemporary art that has repeatedly declared that the painting has died.

Olga Danilkina