His pictures are funny, scary, and painfully sad. Some are very small, while others seem purposefully reduced versions of huge frescoes and panels. There is nothing paradoxical about them, and the size of the painted plane is not the point, of course. The point is the ratio of big to small, so very simple and natural. It would be almost banal to say that the small reflect the great. In any case, this statement would not be new. With Kabachenko, the notion of great is just a reflection of things small.
In the most elementary, simplest sense of the word, his paintings are rustic, countryside scenes. And he does not seem to notice — rather, he prefers to overlook all social speculations and grandiloquent eulogies addressed to the land. All of his characters are either sage or stupid, usually both. They are not in the center of the universe. Never mind where they are, because they assume that the universe emerged to suit their own purposes; they are convinced that this is really so. For this reason the owner’s instinct is replaced by a sense of responsibility, perhaps as the result of being cankerous and wise, or maybe just age. Here old age is treated very calmly and no one bothers to think about death overly much; they know that they will pass to eternity at once — perhaps pantheistic, pagan rather than Christian eternity (“Windows and a Magpie;” “An Old Woman and a Sunflower,” “A Night in Spring,” “A White Cross,” as well as the diptych, “Two Magpies and Two Women.”). Still, life goes on and there is much work to do. Everyone loves working, doing no matter what: singing (“A Woman Singer”), plowing (“Cornfield”) or flying (“From Cloud to Cloud” and “Flight”).
