Igor Shirshkov's artistic vision is located on the verge between life and art itself, freely breaching into these two disjoint States from both directions. With his span of emotions and artistic reflection, Igor Shirshkov captures the world of casual encounters and aspirations, described by the English Director Peter Greenway as "an intimate diary". His realities are considered by the artist as autobiographical visual prose, as a kind of ironic confession, in the due course of which the special areas of hidden context thrive. Dream and love, the two symmetric classical mythologems, reign in this world, where a creative character detaches from oneself, transforms into a medium, into a intermediary between the world of the passions, sorrows and joys, and ideal states of artistic revelations. The author himself turned into a character of Magritte becomes the object of visual experiences of Igor Shirshkov. He is presented as the archetype containing all the basic forms and possibilities of life, space and desire in his walks-metamorphoses. This image acquires the module of the universe, as a carnival mask, almost as the" black square "of Malevich, marked by a unit of space, but included in human existence and hence given up its purely cultural "Suprematist contouring." It is inalienable from human life, from the fate of the author. His character and his symbolic essence are present in almost all phases of the artist's biography, he is permeated by the powers of his body and returns him the warmth of reality after a long and secret walks in the hours of creativity.

Igor Shirshkov does not hide the simplicity and the natural expression of the cultural models of his artistic observations by condoning their free shifts, tensions, concentrations and liberations, as if preparing to fly and drift. The author's double, an artist in the bowler, is fitful and continuous in his magical routes, he plunges into Russian spaces, which at these moments become Eurasian, merging with their fleshless texture, crossing the border in high-speed train, gaining high speed along the TRANS-Siberian highway and, losing gravity, drifts in heaven like a Magritte hero from his legendary "Golconda". It is almost impossible to trace where one story, one semantic unit ends, and the others begin in these mythological dreams. They penetrate each other visually and at the same time dramatically imperceptibly, contrasting, merging and again moving into other dimensions, reminiscing language of medieval Chronicles and at the same time reflecting on imagery of postmodern comics.

The artistic system of Igor Shirshkov generates the effect of painting as a certain piece of art filled with nostalgia for illustrations in the magazine "Knowledge-power "of the times of the" Golden sixties", painted with a deep children's sense, where the painting itself is memories of painting, self-quoting, conceptually tangible of writings and reflections, the experience of tactility of the children's world. It balances on the verge of preservation-destruction, when the artist historically buries visual fabric of his message, endowing it with the spirits of the radical present and the memories of the mental journeys to the past and possible future.

In their dynamic manifestations, as in alchemical processes, Magritte images of Igor Shirshkov, are able to focus, to crystallize, or just the opposite, take it to the air, living the dream of Vladimir Tatlin and Yves Klein about the possibility of flight. The creative coordinate system of the artist contains both of these States at the same time, being associated with life values, however, removing their dominance by the images of carnival perception. Combining air and ground, visual modules Igor Shirshkov pass the "rising" stages of the drama of walks and trips, and their processes of gravitational descents to the ground. Moving on the surfaces of the visual structures, falling into pauses-niches, they turn into a metaphor for traces of stones or grains, as the coordinates of the waymarks in the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm. Topography of the movement of the hero of this mythology, his exits from his dreams, form new dreams intersecting with the fate of the artist, where the principle of waking means a special state of creativity.

In this project, not only does Igor Shirshkov spread his messages, diary leaflets of his experiences, observations and joys, but also collects them into a single knot of common destiny. As a collector, an archaeologist, he keeps, cultivates infinitely variable images of the artist in a bowler hat, emphasizing the great perseverance of art and it is always the personal presence of the Author, transforming any irony into the sacred text.