Ancient bridges and classical columns vanish into nothingness or are enigmatically interrupted. Vines cascade from once splendid triumphal arches, ferns spring from earthy niches in majestic towering walls whilst crumbling statues lie dusty, abandoned; silent reminders of once great empires. A quiet contemplation of Sam Kaprielov's deserted ruins evokes an indefinable nostalgia for bygone ages in which memories, legend and a sense of prophecy of the distant future become intermingled. The shattered remains of marble horses and heroes, half sunken and forgotten in the earth, suggest the inevitable decline of even the proudest, most powerful kingdoms. They recall the romantic verse of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandius: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the dessert . .Near them, on the sand,Half sunk a shattered visage lies … And on the pedestal, these words appear:'My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away. Beyond expressing the transience of time, these ruins provide a pause for peace and reflection. Much as the Pre-Raphaelites and Romantics were drawn towards the cloisters of Oxford and the Medieval cathedral towns, where Oscar Wilde advised Lord Alfred Douglas to go cool his hands in the grey twilight of gothic things, so Sam Kaprielov leads our imaginations toward remote refuges of silence and oblivion. Where mighty roofs collapse, clouds chase through brilliant skies. Beneath, against walls of cavern and temple, waters lap, the surfaces mirroring heaven and unseen depths. Within this isolation, solitary women stand, slim, melancholy, vulnerable. Processions pass silently. At once fantastic and accessible, Kaprielov's drawings are windows opening on to parallel worlds and spatial regions, belonging only to the imagination. The intensity of his vision strengthened by, in no small part, innovative and consummate technical abilities and confidence of composition. Over his career, Sam Kaprielov has moved from charcoal on paper to Rembrandt pastels and a fine charcoal pencil. The process begins by drawing directly onto prepared gessoed board and continues by finely scratching out the whites and lighter areas. Later the detail is inscribed with charcoal pencil. This meticulous academic technique combined with secure draughtsmanship at first glance gives the illusion of a black and white photograph. On closer inspection the viewer beholds a fantastical dream, technically reminiscent of the delirious hand-painted dream photographs of Salvador Dalã. Such images offer an intriguing contrast with the soft sfumato of his early drawings, drawn from the mysterious world of the Franz Kafka. Kafka was an early and important influence on Kaprielov's work and in a series of enigmatic drawings, the artist follows the story of the tragic and alienated character, Gregor Samsa described in The Metamorphosis. This young travelling salesman, imprisoned by the social and economic demands of his elderly parents and sister, suffers both a literal and symbolic transformation when he wakes up one morning to find himself a physically repulsive insect. As Samsa's health deteriorates, Kafka describes the scene, a desert waste where grey sky and grey land blended indistinguishably into each other. Kaprielov's vision of Gregor's claustrophobic room shows him half hidden under a dust sheet, positioned as his sister found him one morning, gazing out of the window, quite motionless, obviously in some recollection of the sense of freedom that looking out of a window always used to give him. Kaprielov heightens the oppressive air with a masterful touch of pale sheen on a leather armchair, cast from the electric streetlight and incessant rain outside the window. Gregor's story provides an unusual inspiration, a very specific focus for Kaprielov's creativity. Generally his work is inspired from his inner dreamscape and outer fascinations, such as his love of architecture. Sam Kaprielov's shadowy caverns and crumbling temples evoke the enchanted grottoes and magical stone cities of the Symbolist Gustave Moreau, whilst towering vaulted arches and roofless palaces pay homage to the grand imaginary works of the architectural Old Masters: Piranesi, Hubert Robert, Guardi and Bernardo Belloto; and to the apocalyptic visions of the French and British Romantics: Eugene Delacroix, Francis Danby and John Martin. Ultimately, Sam Kaprielov's work has more in common with the internalised worlds of the 19th century fin de siecle painters, where Inspiration is never to be found in the subject of a work of art, but in the artist's soul, and the choice of subject is a matter of indifference. Sinuous rhythms of smoke carried windward, delicately drawn monochromatic edifices, jagged cliff faces, static crashing wavesand shimmering metal embrace a language of textures which echo the unclouded lyrical expression of the Symbolist poets. Their belief was that language itself, the phonetic properties of words and their connotations, was self sufficient and self-justifying. One thing is dominant in me, wrote Gustave Moreau in his private notes, the ardent attraction of the abstract. A love of the arabesque: elaborate harmonies of gnarled branches, shattered debris, intertwined flora, also compliment Kaprielov's imagery, as do powerful minimalist abstractions of geometrical circular craters, portholes or the bold lines of columns and posts, forming startling patterns. Elsewhere, a powerful repetition takes hold, in which lines of vintage cars, cans or crates multiply infinitely. An indefinable vagueness in much of Sam's work is punctuated by a desire to shock and challenge. A barbaric splendour, combined with a vital sense of humour, playing with our expectations and presenting us with playful ironies: a giant fish which cannot be eaten, a frozen sea made entirely of stone or a great ship marooned in the desert. This improbable juxtaposition of objects and people recalls the irrational realms of the unconscious, explored by the Surrealists. We are confronted by landscapes at once unfamiliar and yet reminiscent of Dalã, populated with giant eggs, sea shells and giant tortoises. Military tanks invade a Roman amphitheatre and playing cards lay in mysterious claustrophobic interiors. Sam Kaprielov sets about a conscious and unconscious analysis of the psyche and, in the words of Carl Jung: By giving [the unconscious] shape the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. There is a constant presence of cages, trap-doors, snakes and caverns whose Freudian significance is unavoidable, whilst cages, crates, boxes and chests which are carried on rafts, loaded onto and off steam trains and stacked on platforms, symbolising hidden memories that can never be left behind. Kaprielov's work is a visionary Surrealism that unites symbols from mythology, religion and philosophy and is embellished with objects of ethnic ritual from around the world. Floral wreaths of the South Pacific, beads, poles, shields and masks connect his work to the mystical heritage of many disparate cultures. They are woven together and contrasted with one another, underlining simultaneously the diversities and similarities between mystical traditions. It was the mythologies of African and Asian cultures, their understanding of myth and reality, and the evocative creative power of the unconscious that drew the Dada and Surrealist movements to these `curiosities' from far off lands. Particularly powerful amongst such ritual objects is the mask, drawn from memories of his time as a mask-maker in Venice. The deep-seated symbolism of the mask acts as a powerful undercurrent to the artist's fusion of fantasy and reality. He uses it to impart an otherworldliness to his more obscure images and in a more traditional setting of the elusive spectacle of the Venetian carnival: the ghosts of gold and silk who danced along the narrow campielli, courted their mistresses in gondolas and gambled in the Ridotto. The masks echo the duality of the works themselves: darkness and light, positive and negative, the conscious and the unconscious, rational clarity and the irrational. Their presence adds further layers of complexity to the psychological element within his drawings. Masks can conceal, providing anonymity of visage and emotion, as with the expressionless white volto mask worn in his work, Barque and ominously tossed on the waves in Adrift. In a characteristic paradox, the Commedia dell'Arte leathermasks worn in Tarpulin and Wind provide an exuberant and energetic expression, poignantly capturing emotion and mystery of human nature. Within the context of a contemporary art scene largely bound up in explorations of physicality and physiology, Sam Kaprielov's diverse visions represent the work of an original artist who, uniquely, does not seek a specific response from his viewers. Instead, he creates a marriage of imaginations, instilling a sense of half-remembered scenes from a haunting silent movie or the shadows of distant memories. Written in a letter from Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, 1893, Babbacombe Cliff Christopher Woodward acknowledges the artist's direct reference to Hubarto Robert's Imaginary View of the Grand Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins, in his Resurrection and Entombment. The private notes of Gustave Moreau, quoted in Dreamers of Decadence, Symbolist Painters of the 1890s by Philippe Jullian, Pall Mall 1971, page 66 Carl Jung, The Spirit of Man in Art and Literature, The Collected Works of Jung volume 16 The latter were the driving force behind each character's role in the political satires of the Italian Renaissance.