One face, painted endlessly.

Walk is the largest and earliest work in this presentation — almost two and a half metres tall, painted at the turn of the millennium. A single mask-figure crosses the frame in heavy, deliberate stride, head turned slightly to meet the viewer. The body is monumental, almost sculptural; the gesture is walking, but the pose is closer to a saint mid-procession than a passer-by.

The chromatic gambit is pure early-2000s Tselkov: a flat, sweet bubble-gum pink, occupying the picture wall-to-wall, against which a single figure is rendered in the same acid green that returns in Billiard thirteen years later. The pink is not a background — it is a substance, a stage and a sky at once.

"My characters do not walk through cities. They walk through the painting itself."

Note the small blue ring on the figure's hand — the only object in the entire painting that is neither pink nor green, and the only detail that places this giant in any kind of human story. It is the painter's quiet joke: a two-metre saint, dressed for an occasion, wearing one bead.

Since the early 1960s, Tselkov has painted the same protagonist — a smooth, eyeless, broadly grinning head he calls simply the Mask. Critics have read it variously as a Soviet everyman, a clown without a circus, a self-portrait, or humanity reduced to its most stubborn essence. Tselkov refuses each reading and offers no other.

In Head with Legs, the Mask is no longer alone. A single luminous green foot enters the frame from the right, scaled almost to match the head itself, planted across the picture as if it had just stepped onto a stage. The two forms touch but do not fight; the head grins, the foot rests. There is an old, sly comedy here — the body parts of one creature staging a small play for another.

"I do not paint people. I paint a face that the centuries have not yet washed off."

The colour pairing is what makes the work unmistakably late Tselkov: a deep ecclesiastical violet against an acid, electric green. Both are pushed through repeated thin glazes — oil over oil, week after week — until the surface holds light from inside. Stand near it and the purple seems to breathe; step back and the green foot lifts off the canvas like a stage cut-out.

Billiard is unusually wide — almost two metres across, but only ninety-seven centimetres tall — a deliberate cinemascope cropping that forces the viewer to read the picture left-to-right, like a frieze. Two of Tselkov's masks face each other across the table: one a vivid acid green, the other a hot magenta-pink, both gripping their cues with thick, gloved fists.

The cues themselves do most of the choreography. They cross the canvas like beams in a Renaissance crucifixion, dividing the picture into geometric panels of dark teal and bottle-green. The single small ball, tucked into the lower-left corner near a green hand, is almost an afterthought — the game is not really about the ball.

"Painting is the only kind of silence I trust."

Where Head with Legs is a single body in conversation with itself, Billiard is a pair held in stalemate. Both faces wear the same impassive grin Tselkov has been painting for fifty years; only the colour changes. Read together, the two canvases form a small theatre — solo, then duet — of the same enduring character.

Painted in Paris in 2013, Billiard preceded Head with Legs by a single year and was kept by the artist as part of a private studio sequence. It is presented here for the first time alongside its companion piece.