Sergey Klychkov’s paintings are both whimsical and profound, studious and spontaneous. Focusing mainly on portraiture, Klychkov is especially skilled at delineating the expressive details of the human face. While preferencing fine art over illustration, his paintings nevertheless suggest narratives. This comes most to light when his work portrays cartoonishly mismatched juxtapositions of phenomena in fantastical landscapes, implying roots in a highly-developed fictional history. In The Moons (2015), Klychkov’s use of oil paints lends his subject a folkloric aspect. Portraying a lunar fantasia, two female nudes are seated atop the roofs of houses, while two more fly in air. A fifth female figure rides on a purple horse through in the center of the scene. The warped spatial distortion of the figures’ limbs, as well as the houses, give the image a dionysian feel, while Klychkov’s color palette blankets this energy in an ashen-hued tranquility. While verging on the illustrative, the viewer can only imagine the backstory behind such a work. Taken in by the almost littoral calm of the painting, the viewer might feel caught up in the same insouciance with which the two women loll on a nightime roof.