He employs painterly means to explore the possibility of illustrating contemporaneity in portrait form. In his essay Baudelaire makes a passionate case for a new, entirely non-academic understanding of beauty in the depiction of people. Following a rich tradition of portrait art from Matisse to Hockney, Kalenderian succeeds in defining the figures' psychology through the surrounding space, so establishing a universal quality yet lending a complex visualization to the portrait subject. The artists' friends function as motifs of an investigation, therefore, which ranges from painterly issues to considerations of identity and the social, taking up current debates about the self and constructed identities.