THE GHOST OF WAR (THANATOS)
This picture was born from a terrible reality.
War is like some kind of inevitable force, something moving towards you, like an element, silent and impassive. Something inexpressible that causes fear and awe (as in Kierkegaard), that cannot be bypassed, and that one must go through. Like a gopher in front of a snake, you stand and look into its eyes, and they, like a mirror, reflect everything they see: pain, rage, fear, strength, despair, hope, courage, fear, obsession, sacrifice, love, death, thirst for life - everything is in those eyes, everything that people go through, because everyone has their borderline state, their mystical night, their entrance to their hell, sometimes without a guarantee of an exit.
The halo near the ghost of war does not indicate its holiness, but rather that does not live according to the laws of this world but exists according to the laws of another supernatural world. The ghost seems to come out of a silver door, not tied to either time or space and passes us by to change us, to give a terrible challenge that we must accept, endure, respond to, and change because of these torments. In its gut is an abyss, but also infinity!
The black wings of war with one stroke are capable of extinguishing thousands of lives and stealing the warmth of the heart from millions. This is what the extinguished candles symbolize. These young lives would still burn and burn, but there was a war. These dead candles are the points of pain in my work, and to the touch, they are as prickly as a reality for those whose loved ones have died.
No one knows when death will come for them, day or night when it will break the golden thread of life with its claw. And on the head of death, as a reference to Greek mythology and the cause of the Trojan War, there is a golden apple of discord that led to war, because one country could not survive that the other was better, more beautiful, more love and humanity there.
Inside the darkness of war hid an orphaned and widowed soul. It's all in black, but it's alive. The soul also holds a golden twig, because it understands the secret of life, knows that life cannot be destroyed, and feels the infinity of being. The war has locked life on the key, but the soul can reach this key and release itself from captivity.
Small red evil in the form of a dragon is a symbol of the Kremlin and its "master". This serpent is holding a golden branch (according to J. G. Fraser) as a symbol of the fact that it must kill the one whose place it wants to take. So the empire always does - exterminates peoples and occupies their territories.
The image of the head of an angel in a golden wreath is the personification of the three virtues - Hope, Faith, and Love. They are always with us, and they help us to go through the path of trials, hold us and help us not to lose humanity. In the fire and blood of war, it is easy to lose a human face, but then everything loses its meaning, and the worst thing is that a person does not notice when it ceases to be a human being. The war exposes the darkness in each of us, calls it from the unconscious depths and reveals something terrible in us that we did not know about ourselves. It's like opening the door between a human and a non-human and being horrified by what he saw, dumbfounded by the real picture of human nature. Only love and compassion give us the strength not to fall into the abyss of our monstrous human thoughtless and pathological aggression.
This picture is a rebus, it is full of references and semantic parallels, each image can be unpacked into a separate plot, but they are all interconnected. It is impossible to fit into a flat picture all that multidimensional chaos of destruction and creation that war brings to our lives and our souls. And even three-dimensional space is not enough for this, it needs to go further, and dive into the fourth dimension, which we cannot see with the eye of everyday life, but we can see and understand intuitively, associative mind, in the language of parables and images. War is what brings us to the borderline consciousness, where reality and mythology merge, where everyday life is surreal, and where Eros and Thanatos, like life and death, merge into one. War opens up suffering in us that strips us to the bone, to a pulsating nerve, and the value of life is leveled to zero, but at the same time, some kind of mystical reverence for this very life increases. And no matter what horror stands before your eyes, you know that life will still win. My picture is about it.