If he hadn't been surrounded by gushing friends and admirers at the opening of his first art exhibition, I would have asked Dmitri Pakhomov whether he has ever tried the hallucinatory drug LSD.
The unassuming 31-year-old with his grey suit and neatly-trimmed hair looked more like a sales representative than an artist. There was no outward indication that this man was the creator of a wild and wacky fantasy world in glorious technicolor.
Pakhomov is a graphic designer and sculptor who has recently turned his hand to painting. This year he produced two Disneyesque works called "Microreality" in which cloudless skies are filled with floating pink elephants, angels and unidentifiable creatures with long noses suspended either by insect wings or parachutes.
Another pair of paintings, "Cafe," form a single scene when hung side by side. At one end of a long bar, three sinister men in black coats and hats smoke cigarettes and leer into the far yonder while at the other end a woman sits alone.
The only clues in Pakhomov's exhibition that he is a St Petersburg artist, or indeed a Russian artist, are two works depicting Peter the Great. A painting of the emperor in a green military uniform with a striking papier-mache face is contrasted with a plain wooden sculpture depicting him as a medieval peasant, recalling the avid emperor's incognito tour of Europe.
Dmitri Pakhomov is employed in the St Petersburg film industry, and designed the publicity poster for the new release "The Autobiography of Eisenstein." Oleg Kovalov, a director at Lenfilm studios, said of Pakhomov, "I try to work with people who have the purity of a child, and unbelievable talent. I knew this was true of Dima but his exhibition is a big surprise for me."