The Everlasting Garden
"Djekshenbaev achieved creative maturity during the post-Soviet collapse with its political cynicism, monetary hysteria, raising crime and cultural degradation. The absence of the aggressive social commentary in his work might be interpreted as the equivalent of a resounding silence. Shailo's approach to a political system is never radical. It is epxressed by not mentioning the subject that has lost its worth.
The urban area in the artist's works is absolutely unrecognizable. Indeed, the environment in his photographs is without any indications of time and history, or the imperfection of a human being. His work represents the world of universal purity of nature, perfection of the archaic. This turned the artist into a marginal figure. As a result of his disengagement with modern reality the society considered his works peripheral, because they did not meet requirements of the public.
Although Shailo's style is quite traditional, he modifies it quite in his urban series, reducing the panoramic format of the film to fragment with a minimum of compositional elements. He rejects social trends, mass media sensations. The photographic world of the artist represents such characteristics to the modern megapolic as afeelig of loneliness and nostalgia. As a rulem there are no plots in many of his urban landscapes, where a special locus found intuitively by the artist and intuition precedes external portrayal.
Street landscapes as well as landscape sheets of Djekshenbaev are deprived of any definte context. There are no signs of time or real social life.
Impersonal, eternally fiminine softness is peculiar for street landscapes and other genres of the artist's creations.
The artist represents the city not like a definite architectural area, but like a utopian image of industrial Eden. If one takes into account that modern parks and squares go back to the archetype of heavenly garden, it becomes clear why the artist turned to this image his entire life using fragments of alien reality." - Marat Sarulu