It is but a single step from Utopia to the absurd – a fact familiar to the generation of Russian painters who worked in the deconstruction of Soviet ideological symbols. Alexander Kaletski began his career as a visual artist after settling in the United States, at a safe distance from his socialist homeland and its ideology. It was only natural that like his contemporaries, he experienced a passionate desire to create something radically different from the seriousness of the Socialist Realism, whose utopian aspirations were expressed in dogmatic language and the politicization of any and all subject matter. Western modernism and Russian avant-gardism were the poles of attraction and inspiration to those independents departing from the socialist realist canon. Though Kaletski fully appreciated the importance of both

Malevich and Warhol in an advanced capitalist society, he decided to dedicate his creative energy to trash conceptualism while nevertheless retaining figuration.