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Artworks by artist Vasily Kafanov. Gravity is our destiny. It holds us in its grip, nails us to the ground, limits our horizons When you try to go up, gravity makes it so much harder. It keeps repeating along the way: Stop. Take a rest. Don't take another step. Look how much easier it would be to go down. If you lose your footing, you'll tumble, l and gravity will gleefully accelerate your fall - at a rate of 9.8 meters per second. The higher you get the worse gravity will punish you. Gravity is too grave, it never jokes or smiles. I paint clowns going up in hot air balloons. I paint acrobats who toss each other high in the air to thumb their noses at gravity. When it's time for them to come down to earth they use parachutes. But we need gravity to ground us. Otherwise we'll fly all over the place. I paint giant fish floating in the air, defying gravity. My fish carries a tower on its back, maybe it's the Tower of Babel, the first time in history when we tried to defy gravity, to go up as high as the eye can see, all the way to heaven. When we failed and our Tower tumbled, languages were created and divided us into different nations. Nations promptly drew national borders between us and built walls on those borders so that we couldn't come and go. That was gravity's revenge. I was born in Russia but I live in New York City, where I speak a foreign language. Birds show us the way to ignore gravity. They wake us up in the morning, telling us to get up and dare. To build the Tower of Babel again and again. Birds are beautiful and colorful and foolish, flying all over the place, criss-crossing the sky without rhyme or reason. I dream sometimes that I fly with birds. There's comfort in the flock of sparrows that is like a storm cloud in the sky and order in the triangle of geese flying south in autumn. But when man decides to imitate birds and makes himselfs a pair of wings like the ingenious Daedalus of the Greek myth, he is liable to fly too close to the sun. Perhaps we have dared too much already. The sun is getting hotter by the day, and we start to feel the wax on our wings melting. Maybe that's why Bosch paints so many birds in his Garden of Earthly Delights, so many birds in Hell. Birds are the only surviving descendants of dinosaurs. The only other living beings that can fly are insects.

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