He was recognized by the intellectual elite. Great Russian ballerina Maya Plesetskaya, 3-times Olympic Champion in figure ice-skating Irina Rodnina, Nobel Prize Laureates Academicians Sakharov, Frank, Prokhorov - those are just few of the most prominent people who knew Chapiro and whose portraits he did.

In 1990 Mikhail Chapiro immigrated to Canada.  He settled in Toronto and immediately joined the city's artistic life. The "Hittite Gallery" held his solo exhibition in 1992.  In 1993, he moved to Montreal, being fascinated by the singular charm of this metropolis and its people. Being highly productive, Chapiro has constantly enriched his collection with fresh subjects. In 1996 he had a solo exhibition at the Elgar community center in Verdun (a Montreal district).

While Chapiro's themes always remained portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, animals, and flowers, his style has gradually evolved from a merely realistic formalist expression towards an unique painting technique allowing to express at best the softness and subtlety that forms the bottom line of the artist's philosophy. Mikhail Chapiro is, by his substance, perception of the world, and even training, is a figurative, objective, realistic painter. What characterizes his painting is softness, subtlety, implicitly.

However, in some works from different periods, he had come close- and still does so today- to abstraction: mostly with his nudes and flowers, sometimes in portraiture and landscapes. Abstract painting has always fascinated him: during his Moscovite period in the Eighties, he created series of abstract compositions, which he continued once in Canada, in both Toronto and Montreal.

The rationale behind his work, what triggered him is as it has always been, asking the "What?" question-that is, he needs unequivocally an idea fuelling his creativity.

What he tells with one or another abstract work may be philosophical reflections about life, death, the good, the bad, the passage of our soul from the material world

(the life on Earth) into the thin world (the soul's life in the Cosmos); the return of our soul into material world- a sort of an infinite transfiguration-, and so on. It's only then that he would care about the composition, texture, color, etc.

Abstract painting is for him the most interesting experiment, one of his art's facets. Whether his paintings are realistic or abstract, his approach is equally sincere.