The title of the exhibition, Romantic Collection, brings up a series of music albums released in the mid-1990s. The romanticism of the songs by Scorpions, Mylène Farmer and Ennio Morricone was 'highlighted' by the album covers featuring naked female warriors riding winged centaurs reaching out towards noble eagles. What was wishful thinking and what was reality is no longer important. But what is really missing from contemporary Russian art is sensuality such 'romantic collections' could appeal to. Not the sensuality of riding a fiery horse in a fantasy world, but the sensuality of timid breathing' that walks the delicate line between unspoken desire and subtle eroticism, sensuality that avoids the extremes of being eternally 'closeted', the fever of performance and the evasiveness of post-modernism, in which the text is never equal to the context.

Sensuality in Russian art was forced to manifest itself cautiously, in a roundabout way and through allusions as well as by means of colour, geometry and shape, just as in Liudmila Konstantinova's works. The characters in her works manifest their real or imaginary nakedness through crystals of elaborate shades and cuts, hinting at either the otherworldly nature of perception or the psychedelic culture of the 1990s as an era of a successful, or failed, revolution of feelings.

It may seem that a series of acrylic tondi that almost exactly imitate different types of marble patterns is the last place to look for sensuality. But corporeal perceptions and associations – touching marble as a human body or skin of different colours – appear on the surface in glittering streaks and latticed sunrays superimposed across the round surface of the tondi. However, it is difficult to distinguish between the wish and reality in this case as well. The reality of feelings largely depends on what we want it to be, wittingly or unwittingly.

Valery Ledenyov