“Denis Chernov’s favorite artistic medium is graphite pencil or ‘black stone’ as it is literally translated from the Old Turkic. His works, however, are far from what could be described as monochrome. In the potential to convey the impressions of the nature’s visual messages, to render the diversity of materials and textures, and to reflect the nuances or hues of light and shade, his drawings may well compete with oil paintings. The artist’s method, in whose root lies a thorough study of material objects, enables him to address the eternal as well as transient, thus bringing him beyond the limits of the rational. His pencil technique well suits his ability to shift easelly from large-scale vistas to a minute detail or from the untrodden wilderness to the man-tilled landscapes bearing a trace of human presence, thought or even destinies. Pencil, it transpires, makes a perfect tool in the artist’s quest of the paths of the boundless beauty in all its manifestations, be it a lonely tree if not a single branch or a panoramic landscape – all these reflect the artist’s vision of the world as an inseparable entity. In his picture of the world, a smallest object is perceived as an integral part of the omnipresent Macrocosm rather than a thing per se. At the risk of over-generalization, the artist’s motto can be reduced to two words: Infinity and Harmony. As far as his approach to what constitutes an object of art is concerned, he himself put it as follows, “We tend to perceive the beautiful as granted; we have become too much accustomed to the beautiful forms that surround us in our everyday life, so much so that if they were to vanish someday we ourselves would die the same very day”.
-Yuriy Dyatlov